Committing Every Artistic Sin

[doomsday_disco]

It is stripped off—the paper—in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down. I never saw a worse paper in my life.

 

One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.

 

It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate, and provoke study, and when you follow the lame, uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard-of contradictions.

 

The color is repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering, unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.

 

It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.

No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long.

A smouldering, unclean scent: turmeric-dusted acrid marigold, linseed oil, bitter orange peel, crumbling plaster, clotted vanilla, and a whiff of sweet mildew.

[Invidiana]

The scene begins shrouded by a miasma of intensely indolic jasmine, but once the indole fades, an empty room emerges. Whatever gauzy light is left from the late afternoon filters through moth-eaten curtains. Marigolds are scattered on the floor among the shards of a porcelain vase. Ectoplasmic gobs of vanilla ooze from the plaster between curls of peeling, mildewed wallpaper. Everything is a shade of yellow like a pervasive stain, sickly but defiant of what we perceive as beauty. 

 

[ghoulnextdoor]

The smell of creative obsession after you've been working for days without noticing, that moment you finally surface and realize you're hungry and aching and haven't showered in who knows how long. Something sour and unwashed, cheesy and human, the physical cost of disappearing into your work. From across the room it's intriguing, that musk of someone deep in the zone, but up close it's almost repellent—the reality of bodies neglected in service of making something. Where do we go when we're like that? What liminal space swallows us whole, spits us out days later blinking and disoriented? You leave your body there, or it leaves you, time moves differently or doesn't move at all. You emerge with paint under your fingernails, ink stains blooming across your palms, the ghost of ideas still clinging to your hair. The work gets done but you can't remember eating, sleeping, the basic maintenance of being alive. You've been somewhere else entirely, some fevered creative underworld where the only thing that matters is finishing, completing, manifesting whatever's been clawing at your insides demanding to exist. This is what that place smells like—not the glossy fantasy of the tortured artist, but the actual funk of artistic sin. Stale breath and forgotten meals, skin gone sour from stress hormones and tunnel vision, clothes worn too many days in a row because changing them would mean acknowledging the outside world still exists. The sourness of someone who's been burning themselves as fuel, converting flesh and sleep and sanity into something tangible, something real. You bring back the work, yes, but also this smell, this evidence of the sacrifice, proof you went somewhere most people won't follow because it costs too much to stay there. The dry down smells like the finished work itself, an earthy elegance polished by multiple drafts and a diligent editor, refined into something presentable... but underneath runs an insistent current, the indelible signature of the creator's weird funk.

[wilhelmscream]

It smells kind of like... renovating a decaying mansion?

 

Actually terrifying.

 

Plaster? Mildew? Clotted vanilla? (how'd it clot?)

 

Stuffy, stale, acrid... like a room that had been locked up for ages, collecting dust and moisture from a crack in the ceiling.

[bunnicula]

Oh my, this scent is unsettling. It is a bowl of oranges, left to rot in an old, musty mildewy house. The gaudy, taunting wallpaper sags off the walls, streaks of dust and peels of plaster litter the floor. Picture a mildewy room coated in a bitter orange-yellow scent. Guh.. it definitely smells sickly. Even the vanilla is corrupted and clotted. It's a work of art to capture something so creepy.

[leptonpyr]

Wearing this was an absolutely wild experience. I was sort of fascinated by the tug-of-war between revulsion and fascination--it smells gross, but it is fascinating! On my first sniff there was a moment before I noticed the mildew lurking right underneath the smell of oranges, but as soon as I did I kind of wanted to jerk away from it, then I immediately wanted to go back and smell it again. I adore the way this invites us (the reader? the viewer? the sniffer???) to engage with the revolting, the creepy, the unclean: Committing Every Artistic Sin is a faithful olfactory translation of the horror genre.

 

It smells primarily of overripe fruit just beginning to mold, like sniffing a bowl of oranges and noticing their bright, inviting citrus smell at first, only to get a whiff of rot a moment later. It smells like I just grabbed a fistful of food-waste trash and now I need a shower. It's bitter and acrid and reminds me ineffably of something I swear I've smelled in my childhood, but I honestly could not tell you what. (Possibly just trash, but it really did evoke some scent-memory for me that I still can't place.) 

 

About an hour in, I started to notice a note I would describe as fresh, more orangey/citrusy, or possibly marigold? It began to remind me more of the smell of an old bouquet of flowers thrown in the trash, that fresh vegetal, still-pleasant but far-too-strong-because-on-edge-of-rot smell. (...Sorry, gardeners, I just revealed how hopeless I am at keeping even cut flowers alive.)

 

I couldn't tell you what linseed oil smells like, but after some googling apparently it can smell a bit like cod liver oil. This was definitely not fishy (I think if it had smelled like fish that would have tipped the line from fascination to pure revulsion for me), but there was something a little fatty to it. Turmeric is supposed to be a little earthy, bitter, peppery, a little lemony or orangey, and it was fascinating to see those aspects used to bring out acridity and bitterness instead of a pleasant spice or warmth. 

 

This has a mercifully low throw, I really needed to stick my nose close to my skin to get a whiff, which I think is pretty perfect for what this is. If Committing Every Artistic Sin had been all-enveloping, that too would've tipped the line over into pure revulsion for me. It gets much fainter but lasts all day, like lingering damp in the walls. I was sort of obsessed with the experience of wearing it, but I would maybe skip wearing this one to work or to a party, unless it's a party you are trying to leave quickly.

Edited 11 hours ago by leptonpyr