Dean couldn’t stop himself from thinking about abstract things through art. He saw emotions and concepts like war, peace, hope and justice in terms of colours and shapes. His only explanation was that he had been painting too long and read too many art books.
For example, he thought of how people related to each other like blank canvases that became filled with paint as the people interacted and got to know each other.
The first time he consciously did that was with his first crush. It was in his third year at Hogwarts and he’d had a crush on his Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, Professor Lupin.
Most of his canvas for Professor Lupin would have been blue, a nice deep, but bright blue. After all, Professor Lupin was still a teacher, so blue signified his respect. On top of and around the big blue strokes, there would be small pink ones, not tiny lines, but thick, short brush strokes to represent his very first crush. There would be patches of yellow for warm, happy feeling Dean got when Professor Lupin smiled at him, or complimented his work. Finally, there would be tiny lines of red. Long and short, thin lines, almost like pencil marks, to represent that shot of heat in his lower half when Professor Lupin did something especially nice, like run his hands through his hair.
Dean had long since put aside his childhood crush, but even now, in his seventh year, he still thought of Professor Lupin’s canvas like that.
He didn’t just mentally paint his own feelings either. He did it with others’ emotions, particularly with people who Dean could see were in love.
He had spent an entire History of Magic class imagining Ron’s canvas for Hermione. Dean decided it would be mostly red, because if Ron was anything, he was passionate. If he loved anything, he would love it with his whole being and all other emotions would be consumed by it. And Dean could clearly see Ron loved Hermione. There was a lot of pink in Ron’s canvas as well. Hermione was Ron’s first real crush, one that meant more than just looks. Dean had never liked pink and red together before, but for some reason it looked right in Ron’s painting. There was some green, for Ron’s envy when Hermione paid more attention to other boys, even Harry. Not a lot of green, but some. Dean knew that there would be blue, because he knew Ron respected Hermione’s intelligence, but he also knew that the blue would be outlining other colours, as if trying to hide in their shadows. However much Ron respect Hermione’s intelligence, he would never go around broadcasting it. He was too proud for that. The russet brown was for their arguments, because Dean could see they were Ron’s attempts at flirting, a way to keep Hermione’s attention on him. The darker brown was for Ron’s genuine frustration at her apparent indifference. Along the edges of the canvas there would be black, for Ron’s doubt. Dean knew with certainty that Ron doubted he would ever get Hermione, doubted his own worth, doubted his merits, and doubted almost everything about himself.
Dean never imagined Hermione’s canvas of her feelings for Ron. He never did girls. He assumed girls thought about things very differently from the way he and other boys saw things.
One evening in the Great Hall at dinner, Dean found himself imagining Harry’s emotions towards Draco Malfoy. Dean couldn’t quite be sure of their exact feelings, but he was intrigued by their relationship, as it were, and felt compelled to paint it out. Firstly, he saw identical, vertical red and green columns from the top of the canvas to the bottom. The columns of colour twisted and spiraled together creating a twisted effect that reminded Dean of the candy canes his mother hung on their Christmas tree every year. At first, he recognized the columns as representing, not emotions, but Harry and Draco themselves; always at odds, but spun irrevocably together, made one. Dean contemplated the emotions those colours usually represented and felt they fit as well. The red of passion twisted with the green of envy. Dean was not prepared to fully understand or nail down just what kind of passion Harry and Draco had, but no one could deny its existence. Beside the twisted red and green column, there was a similar column of black and white, only instead of being opaque colours, the places where the black and white crossed were coloured gray. Dean understood that part. Harry was the white, the good, and Draco was the black, the evil, but the world is not as simple as Dean knew Harry perceived it. White and black make gray and Harry never accounts for anything in between good and evil. The background of Harry’s canvas would be blank, not white, but the slightly off-white, tanned colour of blank canvas, because even Harry does not know what the foundations of his feelings are for Malfoy.
Seamus caught him staring that time. Dean couldn’t answer when his friend asked him what he was thinking about. He knew he could not possibly explain, but he did not even want to try for another reason. Trying to explain his thought processes and imaginary canvases to Seamus would force him to do something that Dean had been trying hard to avoid. He would have to face his own emotions towards Seamus.
Seamus had let the question go, but it was too late. That night, Dean lay awake and the image of a blank canvas appeared in his mind’s eye, his own canvas for Seamus.
It stared with a layer of green. Not the deep emerald green that represented Draco in Harry’s canvas, or the sick, light yellowish green of Ron’s jealousy. Seamus’ green was a light, earthly green, the green of the Irish, of four leafed clovers, or the green in the rainbow. Seamus’ green was bright and cheery, like Seamus himself was happy and carefree. There was yellow too. The yellow was not tinged by the green, but fierce and bold. It too carried the happiness, energy and all-round cheer that embodied Seamus.
Next, came the reds and pinks, shades too many to count and too various to explain. Reds for the love and lust that Seamus inspired in Dean, and pinks for the heartwarming feelings, like a schoolboy crush, friendship, and partnership. Seamus made Dean feel like they were one body, SeamusnDean.
Dean’s canvas was surrounded by a dark gray, like Ron’s black. It was not black, because Dean did not doubt like Ron did. He knew that if Seamus showed the slightest bit of interest, they could get together. Dean’s gray represented fear. Fear that Seamus might never show interest, fear that if he did their friendship would be ruined, fear that they would not work out, and fear of how others would see them.
Dean was ignorant of the wizarding world’s prejudices on homosexuality, but he knew plenty about the Muggle world’s, specifically his stepfather. He did not want his stepfather’s gaze turned on him in the hard, cold manner that it was turned on the men who walked hand in hand down the streets at home.
Dean was afraid, and that was that. Unless Seamus started something very explicit, Dean would not make a move. After all, he was an artist, not a chess player.
Instead Dean would paint feelings, his own crush on Professor Lupin, Ron’s crush on Hermione, or Harry’s complex relationship with Malfoy. But he would always keep one canvas strictly in his mind. A green based canvas that held friendship, loyalty and love.
A canvas that held Seamus.