My cheeks burn as I shake my head no.
“It means to render a copy of another artist’s work, perhaps in acrylics or pastels. You attempt to go below the surface beyond color choice and composition, always asking why the artist made the choices they did.”
I manage to mumble “Thank you,” but I don’t think Krell hears me, because he sighs and says, “The point is, you have nailed yourself in a box, Miss Reyes, and you are in danger of it becoming your artistic coffin.”
My artistic coffin. I nod good-bye, relieved he doesn’t expect me to say more, and manage to get out of the room intact. I half expect Kevin to be waiting in the hall, and I’m grateful he’s not.
Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry, I tell myself as I duck down the back staircase. The next floor down, I barricade myself in a bathroom stall. This pretty little craft project…utterly insignificant…a waste of paint and canvas. That bastard. I’m so sick of Krell treating me like my feelings don’t matter, like my art is basically garbage.
I’m not nothing. I’m talented, more talented than at least half the people in that class, so why can’t I make him see it?
I sob out my frustration until I’m limp. When I drag myself out of the stall, my eyes are swollen and my makeup’s smeared, so the face looking back at me in the mirror appears distorted and bruised: a Francis Bacon portrait.
I know I’ve messed up badly with Kevin, because even though I sit two seats over from him in Color & Theory, he doesn’t look at me once. Or maybe everyone senses I’m shields up, because Taysha and Bernadette don’t try to talk to me either.
Once class is over, I blow right out of the building. I march up the street past the homeless shelter and the alternative radio station. I’m eyes forward, thinking all I want to do is get through the next four hours at Artsy. Clean some shelves. Restock some displays. Ring up some sales and be done.
But fate’s got it in for me, and who should be striding toward the opposite corner but Adam. Today when I can barely talk and my eyes are so puffy and red they’re basically slits, that’s when I run into him? I dig out my sunglasses and shove them on.
Adam’s looking the other way, so I could wait until he’s passed, but no, he spots me and waves. “Sabine, what’s happening?”
Now I’m stuck. “Nothing much. Heading to work.” The light changes, and I cross the street. He’s eating an apple, and the sleeves of his snug Henley are pushed up, revealing sculpted biceps. I’m glad the lenses of my sunglasses are so dark, because he’s a Rodin bronze come to life and I can’t help sneaking glances at his forearms.
When I step onto the curb, he pauses chewing to smile. “When’s the next sale at Artsy?” he says.
The flesh of the apple is so white next to his lips it’s distracting. “In a few days. This sale’s a big one. Two for one on paint, canvas, drawing pads. Time to stock up,” I say, quoting the flyer.
“You’re right,” he says. “Time to stock up.”
I tell myself to look away, but can’t quite do it. Not when his dark, dark eyes are fixed on mine.
Finally, I break off eye contact and adjust the strap on my messenger bag.
Adam sticks his apple between his teeth and reaches into his backpack. He takes out another. “Honeycrisp. Want one?”
The red-and-green-streaked skin looks painted on, it’s that perfect. I’m tempted, but for some stupid reason, I hesitate. Oh, for God’s sake, don’t be ridiculous. Take it. “Thanks. It looks delicious.”
“It is.”
I stow the apple in my bag and Adam says, “You mind if I walk with you? I’m going this way, too.”
I like that he asks, that he doesn’t just assume. “Yeah, that’s cool.”
We continue up Raymond past the Metro stop and the trendy restaurant in the converted train station. The scent of hot pizza wafts out, reminding me I didn’t eat lunch, and it’s too late to get something. But at least now I’ve got an apple.
“So how’s it going with Krell?” Adam asks.
Even though today was mostly my fault, that doesn’t stop me from saying, “Krell’s a pig. I don’t even want to tell you what he said to me in class, it was so awful.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
I soak in the only sympathy I’ve been offered today.
“Let me guess,” Adam says. “He made an example out of you.”
“How did you know?”
“When I was a first-year, he cut people down all the time.”
I feel both relieved and pissed to be one of a long line of Krell’s victims.
“It blows when the person you worshipped turns out to be a dick,” Adam says.
“Right? I dreamed about studying with Collin Krell. I thought it would be amazing, learning from one of America’s top contemporary portrait painters.” I catch myself before I blurt out how I’d secretly hoped Krell would mentor me. “How did you survive him?”
“I kept my head down, studied Krell’s paintings for clues to what he wanted to see in my work, and asked Hautmann to be my adviser instead.”
Hautmann’s work is all abstract. He’s the last person I’d want as an adviser. I sigh. “I’ve never seen Krell’s work, just photos of it, and you know how a photo tells you almost nothing about a painting.”
“You didn’t see his show at the Ankarian Gallery last February?”
I shake my head and force out a smile. Tears burble up in my eyes as I remember that day, and I blink them back. “I was supposed to, but something happened, so I never got there.”
We walk in silence past the outdoor-furniture store. Adam pitches his apple core in a nearby trash can, and then he says, “Would you like to see the painting Krell’s working on now?”
I brake in the middle of the sidewalk. “You’re joking. The one that just sold for over a million without the buyer seeing it?”
“His dealer hasn’t seen it either, but I have.”
“You have?”
He pulls out a set of keys and dangles them in my face. “One of the perks of cleaning his studio. I get to see the master’s work up close.”
I don’t expect the rush of envy that floods me.
Adam grins and pockets his keys. “Yeah, you want to see it.”
“It’s that obvious?”
“You’re not that hard to read.”
I study the sidewalk, avoiding his eyes. I can’t deny it, so I don’t even try.
“What time are you off?” he says.
“Seven?”
“I’ll meet you in the CALINVA parking lot near the back at seven fifteen.”
“Wait. You’re serious about letting me into Krell’s studio?”
“You deserve to have someone do something nice for you today.”
He holds my gaze and I sense he isn’t offering to do this only because he pities me. “But what if Krell catches us?”
“Krell’s got a new baby. He’s always gone by six thirty. Come on. When’s the next chance you’ll get to see a Collin Krell up close?”
All his work in LA is in private collections, and even though the painting will be unveiled at a reception in November, the party will be so packed I’ll be lucky to get within ten feet of it.
And now Adam’s offering to help me get a handle on Krell and I’m turning him down? Who am I kidding? “Okay, I’m in. See you at seven fifteen.”
I meet Adam at a back door near the loading dock. “You came,” he says, and the delight in his voice makes me smile.
“I said I would.”
The door lets us in by the main hall. Evening classes are in session, so Adam leads me to a service elevator in a back corridor. We ride up to the second floor and Adam doesn’t take his eyes off my face and I’m trying to play it cool, but the skin on my arms feels like it’s sparking.
“Krell’s got the biggest studio at CALINVA,” Adam says. “The board was so hot to snag the art world’s rising star away from UCLA, they forced out two other instructors to pay him what he wanted.”
I
imagine Krell gloating about his salary the same way Iona Taylor did when she heard hers was twice what the other actors were getting for the reality show she’s in.
The elevator opens and we tiptoe into the hall. Most of the studios are quiet as we go by, but loud African music pours out from one of them. “That’s Ofelo,” Adam says. “Around midnight the drums really start pounding.”
We’re outside Krell’s door, and everything feels a little surreal. I can’t believe we’re stealing into Krell’s studio. I’m hit with the same rush I’d get when Hayley and I used to sneak into friends’ yards and party in their pools while they were away.
Adam goes to unlock the door. “You cannot tell anyone you’ve been in here,” he says, his voice stern.
“My lips are sealed.” I mime locking them and throwing away the key.
Adam doesn’t smile. “I’m serious. Not even your friend with the purple hair.”
The smile falls off my face, and for a moment I wonder how Adam knows Taysha and I are friends, but I realize he’s probably seen us hanging out in the common areas while he works around CALINVA. “I promise I won’t tell anyone.” From what I remember from the student handbook, CALINVA doesn’t have an explicit rule about going into a faculty member’s studio without permission, but that doesn’t mean we won’t get in trouble if Krell finds out.
“Good.” Adam opens the door and I scurry inside. He hits a switch and the fluorescents slowly brighten. The room smells of warm beeswax and oil paint.
My fingers start to itch as I take in the orderly disarray of the room. Couch, worktable, easels, sink, canvases stacked against the walls. Krell’s inner sanctum.
Krell would shit himself if he knew I was in here. In the interview I read, he called his studio “an extension of [his] inner self,” a private, closed-off space where he could express himself freely.
I brush my hand along the velvety back of a paint-speckled couch as I walk over to the huge worktable that anchors the middle of the room.
The top of the table is half covered with mason jars. Paintbrushes fan from their mouths like flower bouquets, and I run my fingers over the bristles. Krell has every type, size, and shape of brush from synthetic to natural hair bristles. “Must be nice.”
“What?” Adam’s across the room, standing by an easel with a large wood panel on it.
“There’s at least two grand worth of brushes just on this table.”
From here all I see is the back of the wood panel, but I can tell it’s linden over a basswood frame. It’s expensive, but the painting technique Krell uses requires a surface that doesn’t warp.
As I walk over to Adam, I see dozens of photographs taped to the wall by the easel, headshots of a man I’m guessing is the one whose portrait Krell’s working on. I come around the easel, and gasp, taking in the unfinished painting.
“It’s so unfair,” I murmur.
“What’s unfair?”
“That a jerk like Krell has so much talent. What’s it called?”
“Duncan.”
I nod at the photographs. “I’m guessing that’s the real Duncan?”
“Yep.”
Even unfinished, the painting is more subtle and complex than I could have imagined. The portrait is somehow realistic and abstract simultaneously, as the right side of the man’s face disintegrates before the viewer. I peel a photograph off the wall and hold it up to the canvas. The look in the man’s eye is unmistakably Duncan’s.
The urge to touch the painting floods me, and I reach out, but Adam grabs my wrist. “Wait. Don’t touch. You’ve got oil on your fingers.”
I jerk, surprised at myself. “Sorry. I don’t know why I did that.”
“No problem.” He reaches for a bottle of hand sanitizer. “Here. Hold out your hand.”
Adam squirts the gel on my palm, then sandwiches my hand between his. Goose bumps race up my arm as he rubs the cool gel into my skin. It’s been so long since I’ve been touched.
“It happens to me sometimes,” he says, his voice molten. “A painting or a sculpture grabs hold of me, and it’s not enough to take it in with my eyes.”
He lets go of my hand, and it’s like a snap, a current breaking. I almost need to steady myself.
“Now you can touch,” he says.
I glide my fingers over the painting, reading the layers of pigment like a language. Krell built them up slowly, a layer of oil paint mixed with beeswax then fused to the layer beneath. They are a topographical map of expression. The painting is both the artist and his subject, a conversation, a pact they’ve made.
A feeling builds in my chest, a longing I can barely grasp much less explain: I want to be this good; I could be this good if Krell would help me.
I have to get him on my side. But how?
Gazing into the electric pulse of Duncan’s eyes, I realize I’m looking at a window into Krell. All his techniques are on display, all the beliefs that fuel his artistic decisions, from how to compose a painting to how to choose pigments.
Everything he refuses to teach me is right in front of me.
Click! I look up and Adam holds out his phone. “You need to see your face.”
He’s caught me reaching out, my fingertips skimming the surface of Krell’s painting, mouth open like I am trying to breathe in its essence, taking it in not just with my eyes, but with all my senses.
“Give me your number,” Adam says. “I’ll send it to you.”
I stick the snapshot of Duncan back on the wall, rattle off my cell number, and turn back to Krell’s painting. “This is one of the Strata series, isn’t it?”
“You read Krell’s interview in Artforum. I’m impressed. Yes, Duncan’s portrait is layered over another image.”
Adam throws his head back in a pose that’s classic Krell. “‘In the Strata series, I layer over my obsessions. Locking away my innermost thoughts acts as a form of cleansing, allowing me to concentrate purely on my subject. The painting that results is both public and private, offering the viewer a shared and concealed reality.’”
He flares his nostrils as he finishes, and I crack up. “You’ve really got Krell down.”
“I’ve had five years to observe him, so, yeah, I’ve got him down.”
I run my hand along the edge of the painting. “You know what’s underneath, don’t you? What Krell’s secret obsession is.”
Adam steps back, a hand raised in denial. “No, when I saw Duncan, the lower strata were already covered.”
I’m glad I don’t have an X-Acto knife on me, because Adam would have to wrestle it out of my hand to stop me from scratching through the surface and seeing what’s there.
“What did you learn?” I ask him.
“What do you mean?”
“You told me you studied Krell’s paintings to learn what you needed for your art. What did you learn?”
He shrugs. “I can’t put it into words, and even if I could I doubt it would help you.”
I stretch, raising my arms over my head, reaching for what’s beyond my grasp. “Yeah, you’re probably right.”
“Seen enough?”
“Yes,” I tell him even though I could easily stand here another hour or two.
We pick up our stuff and duck out of Krell’s studio. We’re quiet as we make our way to the back door. Adam props it open and I expect him to follow me out, but he says, “I need to say good night here, I’ve got to go back upstairs to work.”
I’m slightly disappointed, but I say, “Thanks. I really appreciate you showing me Krell’s painting.”
“Anytime.”
The door shuts behind him, leaving me alone beside the loading dock. As I walk away, my phone buzzes and the screen lights up with the pic Adam took of me in front of Krell’s painting. I shake my head at the look of rapture in my face.
It’s like they say: Love the art, hate the artist.
I’m halfway up the block when Adam sends me a second pic, one of Krell’s entire painting. I spread my fingers to enlarge
it, but the details blur.
You really can’t tell much about a painting from a photograph.
I’m dreading Painting Strategies on Wednesday, knowing I have to face not just Krell and Kevin, but everyone else who witnessed my humiliation in class on Monday.
I get to class early and stake out a stool next to the easel Kevin normally picks. Yesterday, when I thought about what I said to him, I realized I needed to come up with a better apology than simply saying, “I’m sorry.” Taysha and I talked it over, and this morning I set the apology for him on my lap and wait for Kevin to arrive.
My classmates trickle in, and it’s like Monday never happened. No one’s ignoring me or offering me pity smiles, they’re basically going about their business.
I watch the door and can’t help noticing how much sharper and edgier my classmates have become since the semester began. It’s not just their painting, it’s them. Bernadette’s long blond hair is tipped neon pink, and the left side’s shaved. Gone is her simple white tee; the black one she now wears under her slouchy overalls is shredded almost into ribbons.
Keiko’s got ten more chains hanging off her ears, and somehow they make a plaid skirt with suspenders look angry. Birch sets his paint box down a few seats from me. His gold metallic shorts are shorter than any I’ve ever worn, and a new silver nose ring taps his upper lip. Instantly, I’m taken back to a fight I had with Mom junior year.
She was cooking me a veggie omelet while I thrashed through my wardrobe trying to create an artsy, edgy look.
“Why can’t I get a nose ring?” I railed. “I look so boring. I’m practically invisible.”
“And that’s exactly how you will look as long as we live at the Taylors’.”
I grabbed a granola bar, ignoring the omelet she’d put on the table. “It’s not fair! I shouldn’t have to dress to make them happy.”
Mom took my face in her hands, holding fast as I tried to push away. “You don’t need a nose ring to prove you’re an artist. You’ve got talent, Sabine.”
Looking around now, I realize Mom couldn’t have imagined how CALINVA turned out to be as much a stage as the ones she used to play on—how if you want your art to be taken seriously, you’ve got to dress unconventional, unexpected, and unfettered, too.
What I Want You to See Page 5