“But what you are talking about is craft, even if you are very good with these pumpkins. Tell me, how much would you pay for one of those?” He laughed. “I wouldn’t buy one, no offense. I don’t think you would, either. Not because they’re not good for what they are, but because of what they are. Now tell me, how much would you pay for this Durant you saw?”
“I’m not talking about giving up painting.”
“Did Evan Durant spend his time carving jack-o’-lanterns? A craftsman can schedule his time. An artist has to dive in. These are the best things I’ve seen in my classes in a long time.”
At that hint of praise my argumentative tack dropped, and I lapsed into full-on therapy mode. I said maybe that was true, but what about the other classes at the school? What about all the classes at the handful of other art schools in Boston, or all the classes at the hundreds of schools across the nation? What about New York? What about people like Durant, who dropped out as undergraduates and painted under the radar for years? What about time, about multiplying the competition by each entering class of the future, filled with new prospects? Was it so bad to hedge my bets a little when some college dropout in a basement in Peoria was potentially doing the same thing I was doing but better?
I caught my breath and began to apologize. Professor Wei’s slouch had intensified. He was staring up at the ceiling, and he looked like a plank that had been tipped over onto the office chair. I wasn’t sure his butt was even in contact with the seat cushion. He asked to see my notebook again, and I waited while he looked through it in much the same fashion as before.
“You’re right about the odds. But you’ll have your whole life to sell pumpkins to rich gentiles and menorahs to rich Jews if this doesn’t pan out. As a professor my job is to spot talent and nurture potential, not to make any promises, but I will make you one promise regarding your potentiaclass="underline" a friend of mine runs a gallery out in Brighton. If the rest of your series comes out as well as that one, I’ll help you get your paintings in it.”
So I forwent any holiday-themed business ventures and instead dove in, as Professor Wei had suggested, to the work. I had to start transporting the finished works to a storage closet at the school because there wasn’t space in the unsteamed corner of my studio and I was worried about the canvases warping or taking on a beefy smell. A few times I asked the professor to take a look at them, but he refused, saying this was a personal project and I shouldn’t let anyone else in just yet. He was right again. I had something I wanted to say to Durant: that I was not just one face in a crowd, that some people deserved to be the focus of their own painting. It was a personal project, and thus it was different than anything else I had created. Before I had always gauged my work by how closely it approximated the work of established masters and contemporary upstarts, but an internal metric had sprung out nowhere for these paintings, offering me intense joy when I felt I was hitting that shadowy goal and despair when I wasn’t. When I couldn’t get a detail right, I would feel the whole series was doomed.
I worked away through the coldest months. Snow was on the sidewalks and piled in the gutters outside, and little breezes blew the frigid air in through the little gap I left open at the window. I learned to calibrate it, two inches on cold days, one inch during the freezes, closed at 9 p.m., an hour before the kitchen below shut down. I imagined being interviewed one day in Aesthetica or Juxtapoz and telling stories of my early days painting above a Vietnamese restaurant, drinking from a bottle of cognac I could not afford.
After the fragmented face I’d started in October, I worked on a crowd much like the ones in Durant’s paintings, except every face in the crowd was my own, every expression a variety of expression I actually made. In another the faces of everyone in a crowd were blurred beyond recognition, except for one face (not mine—too obvious, of course) in high focus. I replicated the famous photo of Muhammad Ali towering over a downed Sonny Liston, but each of those faces in the background, those heads sticking up behind the ring, was Ali’s as well, sharing his cock-headed moment of triumph, his dare to Liston to get up again. I became hyperaware of crowds when I was in public, aware of my place in them, whether I was dead center or on the fringes, where I would be if the crowd were composed and framed. I even sought some out: the game-day commuters at Kenmore, the new-exhibit-goers at the Museum of Fine Arts.
When May came, late in the semester, I had a twelve-painting series, and Professor Wei finally let me show it to him. We lined them up, five around the walls inside his office and the other seven in the hallway outside. He walked from piece to piece, examining each with his trademark silent-concentration face. It was not a good sign. In class he was effusive about the work he liked. He had sung Durant’s praises for two hours, though no one in the class was interested. Watching him apply his critical eye made me reexamine the set from the perspective of an independent viewer, and the stress of his silence suffused me with doubts not about my technique but about my choices. I knew what he was going to say: the choices were wrong. The only portrait they showed was a self-centered pretender.
I realized I had never been taken apart before. I’d had no reviews in papers, little or big. My work had not been on any sites and had not been subject to angry comment threads. I’d exposed myself so far only within the womb of the academic workshop, where most of the students were middling and the professors paid to be gentle. As blunt as Professor Wei was in class, I sensed his workshop was a soft territory compared to where we were heading now.
He was steepling his fingers again, tapping the two index fingers together. When his response finally came, it was less thorough than I’d come in hoping for, but a much easier escape than I had been anticipating. “Well done,” he said, and dialed a number on his cell phone.
“David, I have something to show you.”
At that time I thought expectation was the hardest state, that I couldn’t bear the waiting. When I think back to that summer, I remember doing a lot of walking around town. I’d walk north through the cobbled brick streets of Beacon Hill, cross the Longfellow Bridge into Cambridge, then cross the Harvard Bridge back to Back Bay. Other days I’d walk through the Fens and down to Jamaica Plain. My spurt of inspiration had played out, and I was eager for the next one to catch me, but so filled with ambition I was in no state to be caught. Halloween was around the corner, and I could once again bankroll the rest of the year, but I was reluctant to begin what Professor Wei had dismissed as craftwork when I had actual artwork hanging on the walls of that gallery out in Brighton. Only in retrospect can I see what a joy it should have been, feeling like I only had to choose what I wanted to become and it would happen.
On a Saturday in late September I took the T out to Brighton to begin collecting my paintings, none of which had sold. I was going to have to bring them back one by one and find a place to store them; I had graduated and no longer had access to the school facilities. I was an artist on my own now, and no one owed me anything. I’m sure the professor would have met with me to give me advice, but it was no longer his job, and I was embarrassed to visit him because it would have felt too much like begging. I went in and took the first canvas off its hooks, my self-portrait divided into every self I thought I could have been, my favorite to look at when I was composing them, the most painful to look at now.
Outside I leaned it against the wall to give Deckinger a call. I had a spreadsheet of all my clients from the previous year, and the plan was to start contacting them the first of October. I called Deckinger so early because he was my biggest ticket, but more so because I hoped he might buy one of my paintings, even if only out of nostalgia, even if only to have a story for his friends: “I bought this from the kid who carves my jack-o’-lanterns.” If he only gave me eighty dollars for it, if he hung it in his walk-in closet, the sale would mean more to me than another five thousand dollar commission.