She is an artist. A makeshift studio, filled with canvases, paint, a spattered drop sheet.
A woman falling, abstracted, thick impasto strokes.
A mural in her hallway, flowers and vines, so well drawn that she reports the bees will often fly in to try and gather necter, bumbling upon the wall...
A giant mural in her studio, portraits of all her idols, heroes, her very own "Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band".
Her style, formative, incomplete. He is envious, not necessarily of the achievement but of the process, the unobstructed flow, uncensored, only in the end does she judge it, and seldom poorly, it's always good enough and sometimes better.
She recrafts great paintings that she admires out of buttons, "The Kiss", by Klimt, others, they sell, he laughs and calls her "Buttons".
He is a writer, and unlike her finds nothing to be good enough. The words are written and stricken out and written again. Pages drafted and scratched, rewritten, typed, printed, and scratched out again, all this to - if he's lucky, arrive at a sentence. His shelves are filled with books by writers he admires, his own Parthenon, the greats, ranging from collections of folk tales, psychology, the writings of Freud, Jung, Symbolism, History, Fiction, Auto-Biographies, the distillations of millennia of thought, the small fraction that he's able to apprehend; his own shelves, bursting, he's read them all, but you can never read everything. There will always be more. An undiscovered author, poet, historian, a fresh point of view, different, and here he understands the scholars bargain with the devil, for life is short and no matter how hard or much you strive you can apprehend but the smallest portion of it.
They both accept compromises, find ways to make ends meet, pay the bills.
He is a writer, she is an artist. He, She.