In the school parking lot, I set the envelope on the passenger seat, ducked behind a Suburban, and pulled on my Merry Mop pants and tunic. Barreling up the freeway, I set my hand on the envelope. Look, Mom. I’m going to be okay.
The First-Year Exhibition is only a few weeks away, and Krell has us bring in our preliminary studies for the pieces we plan to show. The room is unusually packed for first period; no one has skipped class.
Wooden easels buck and scrape as my classmates drag them across the floor, looking for the spot with the best light to display their work.
Bernadette and Bryian have angled their easels in a corner of the room like they’re defending the keep. Sheets of thick plastic cover both their paintings, while everyone else is busy unwrapping theirs.
I unpack the small acrylic study of Julie. I’ve started the actual painting, but it’s two feet by three, too awkward to lug around. Plus, the study is more detailed and finished, so Krell will have a better idea of what the final painting will look like.
We all wait by our easels, stealing glances at our neighbors’ work. Tensions have run high since the rumor went out that six gallery owners have accepted invitations to the show.
Krell goes around the room and everyone pretends to be busy, but they’re listening in to what Krell says to the person who’s presenting their painting to him. Bernadette is even more blatant, shadowing Krell like a stalker.
I twist my hair up off my neck and shove a pencil through it. I’ve been a wreck for the last twenty-four hours, and I replay Adam’s pep talk from last night.
“Don’t be nervous about tomorrow. Krell’s going to see how much progress you’ve made.”
I was wiping my brushes clean while Adam perched on the table beside me. “He hasn’t looked at my work in days,” I answered.
“You underestimate how far you’ve come. I bet you’ll have a solo show lined up before you graduate.”
His praise thrills me again, even though I fought believing him. “I doubt it. I heard the chances of getting a solo show are about one in a hundred?”
“Closer to one in two hundred, but you’ve got that level of talent.”
I roll up on my toes and down a couple times, trying to quiet my nerves. I hate to run, but right now I could use a few laps.
Krell nods and points to areas on people’s paintings, then waves his hand to suggest they delete something or spreads his fingers to suggest they expand it. My classmates’ faces scrunch up in concentration.
The risks I’ve taken lately…I hope they’ve been worth it. I can see with my own eyes that my technique is better than ever, but Krell cares about more than technique.
I wish Kevin would joke with me, but he’s caught up in making sure the motor attached to his mock-up is working.
His piece, Unresolved, is unique. Fifty narrow strips of canvas flip in random patterns so the painting changes every sixty seconds. Mathematically speaking, there are hundreds of ways to experience it.
Next to this, my study feels mundane. It doesn’t matter that I’m a better painter. Kevin’s challenged the limits of painting.
Now it’s Kevin’s turn and I shift from foot to foot as Krell questions him about color choice and directionality. “Are the two sides opposing forces or are they meant to reveal aspects of one another?”
I envy the way Kevin answers so calmly.
The last thing Krell tells him is, “Watch your execution. There’s a real danger your piece will be perceived as cute or gimmicky.”
Krell pauses to scribble in his little leather notebook, and Kevin wipes his forehead on his sleeve. He gives me a look. That was brutal.
“You’re up,” Krell says, turning to me.
Out of the corner of my eye, I spy Bernadette behind him. She’d walked away when Krell critiqued Kevin, but she’s back, vulturing over Krell’s shoulder.
He comes around the easel and I resist the urge to pick up Julie and hold it to my chest. Krell peers at my painting. “This is the homeless woman who stands out on Raymond.”
“Yes,” I say, surprised he recognized her.
“You’re romanticizing the homeless.” His voice is thoughtful, almost concerned.
“I didn’t think I was doing that,” I say quietly. “I thought I was capturing who she is.” I hold up her photo and he takes it from my hand.
“Ms. Reyes, it is not enough to capture a person’s essence in a portrait.”
I try not to sigh. The hours I’ve spent with his painting have given me a sense of what Krell means. His portraits aren’t literal portraits, but if I had to explain why they work, I couldn’t. “I’m sorry, but I don’t get what else I’m supposed to do.”
I expect Krell to smirk and say something cutting, but instead he nods. “Think of it this way: Portraiture should force the viewer to contribute their own perceptions. How can you involve the viewer? Make them fill in missing information, question their assumptions about the subject, examine their prejudices?”
He hands the photo back to me. “You can render Julie perfectly, but how will you get people to really look at her?”
I stare back at him, thunderstruck. For the first time, I understand what Krell has been trying to teach me.
“Study portraits by Willy Steam, Francis Bacon, or Cindy Sherman,” he says. “Steam, especially. You can’t walk by one of his paintings without trying to fill in the blanks.”
“Okay, yeah, I’ll do that.”
“All right, then. Good start.”
He moves on to Bernadette, and I let out the breath I was holding in. At this instant, I feel as if the barrier between me and what I need to learn is lifting. My grasp is slippery, but I’m beginning to sense where I need to go from here.
What Krell told me to look for in Steam’s and Bacon’s and Sherman’s work is what he does in his: arrests the viewer and gets them to question the story.
Now I have to find a way to do that in mine.
Across the room, Bernadette nods at Krell, her face serious. Her painting’s uncovered, and I make out the figure of a man formed by hundreds of small brown paint strokes on the white canvas. What? I move closer, and goose bumps shoot up my arms.
What I thought was brown paint turns out to be thorns. Actual thorns.
“What you’re doing with this piece,” Krell tells Bernadette, “embodies CALINVA’s artistic mission.”
Questioning. Provoking. Agitating. Crap, he loves it.
Bernadette notices me behind him, and the smile she gives me feels like a challenge.
Everyone’s been talking about the awards the faculty gives out after the exhibition, and how the instructors select a student to mentor based upon their work.
I wind my way over to Taysha. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but is Bernadette a stone-cold killer?”
Taysha cocks her head at me. “All-star girls’ volleyball champion three years running.”
“I should have seen that coming.”
“Leopard can dye her hair pink, but she can’t change her spots.”
Adam tried to warn me about my peers competing for the faculty’s approval. I return to my easel, my neck prickling.
Class ends and people start packing up. Kevin carefully rests his prototype in a cardboard box lined with foam. “You know what you need to do for Krell?” he asks.
“Yeah, I think so.”
He shoves out his fist and we bump.
I need to look at Krell’s painting in a different way—to look beyond the layers of color and brushstrokes for how Krell relates to the person he’s painting and what he wants to say with his art. If I can figure out why he does that, I can get there, too.
I put Julie away, and before I walk out, I text Adam. SURVIVED KRELL’S CRITIQUE
KNEW YOU WOULD—TAKING RISKS PAYS OFF.
Yeah, sure does. If I hadn’t spent hours staring at Duncan, I’d probably be hopelessly confused by what Krell told me to do today. I’ve got another week before Krell’s painting leaves his studio, and I need
to use that time well.
My painting can’t just be good. It has to be extraordinary.
I thought Duncan was a window into Krell, but it turns out it’s not exactly transparent. The next few nights, I puzzle over what he is saying with his art while I try to capture Duncan with my brush.
Duncan is part of a series Krell’s painted in which the faces seem to disintegrate, but no matter how hard I try, I can’t explain why his faces shed pieces like autumn leaves. Trying to figure out what’s in Krell’s head feels like trying to see through milk.
And when I ask Adam what he thinks, he tells me I need to discover the answer for myself.
Krell could be saying anything, so I search through interviews and academic journals, only to discover that he refuses to reveal why. “Look at the work,” he tells every critic or journalist who asks.
Saturday is supposed to be the day I fix my painting, but when my alarm rings, a thought pins me to my bed. If I can’t figure this out, I might as well give up trying to be a real artist and go back to making dog portraits.
I force myself to get out of bed. I throw on Mom’s old kimono and scuff into the kitchen. Mrs. Mednikov looks up from her Paris Match. “You do not look well, Sabine.”
“I’m tired.” I take a bagel out of the bag and stare at it. It’s too much work to toast it.
“You should go back to bed.”
“I can’t. I have to work on my painting for the First-Year Exhibition.”
“My art was my medicine,” Mrs. Mednikov muses over her coffee. “When I danced, I forgot the pain in my feet and my aching back. I would lose myself in the music.”
Her story could be mine. “I used to lose myself in my painting. But not lately.”
“This instructor of yours, he’s made you doubt yourself.”
“He makes me question what I’m doing.”
“It is good to question, but deadly to doubt. You cannot leap if you are afraid to fall. That is how you get injured.”
I smile. “I wish my mom could have met you.”
“I wish I could have met her as well. What would she tell you if she was sitting in this kitchen?”
“Stop moaning and go paint.”
“Succinct, your mother.”
“Yeah, she didn’t waste words.”
I reach for the knife, cut the bagel in half, and pop it into the toaster. Mrs. Mednikov and I watch a squirrel spring about the branches of the purple-leaved maple outside the window as we eat.
After breakfast, I huddle in a blanket on a wicker chair on the still-cold sunporch. My hands hug the coffee cup perched on my knees.
Look at the work.
Is Krell saying the truth about a person is elusive, that it can’t be captured in a painting—because while he’s painting someone, what is true about them is already changing or disintegrating?
I sip my coffee and a thought creeps up on me. I don’t need to know exactly what’s in Krell’s head, because he’s gotten into mine. Look at the work.
He wants me to be involved—to contribute my perceptions, to question my assumptions.
Look at the work. Engage.
I peer at my unfinished canvas of Julie and the study I made for it. I haven’t gone far enough. I don’t want some-one to just look at Julie, I want people to see they’re wrong about her. That she’s so much more than what they assume when they spy a homeless woman standing on a street corner.
I set down the coffee and stare out the windows. Bright yellow mums as big as my fist dot the garage wall. One is bobbing up and down, and as I follow it with my eyes a memory sweeps over me.
I’m walking to a convenience store with three kids from Advanced Art when we step around a woman pushing a shopping cart piled with mismatched bags. The two guys Josie and I are with snigger and start to crack crude jokes about her so loudly there’s no way she can’t hear them.
She’s dressed so carefully, in a yellow skirt and matching jacket, and little white gloves that aren’t the cleanest, and I know how hard she must work to look the way she does. As Josie and I walk by her, I want to stop and apologize for the two jerks I’m with. I sense this wasn’t always her life, that she might have been a teacher or worked in an office, but something, an illness or an accident maybe, wrenched her out of that world.
I want to apologize, but my classmates are right there, so I don’t. I’m too aware that if they knew how I sleep in my car, and shower in the gym, and stay late in the safety of the auditorium while the theater kids rehearse, they’d judge me just like they judged her.
It’s so easy to judge, I think, to assume a hundred things about people that are untrue, or to blame them for their problems. It’s the opposite of seeing them.
I throw off my blanket and scramble out of the chair. This painting isn’t about me, I try telling myself. It’s about Julie.
But the edge between a normal life and being homeless is razor thin. One accident can push you from one into the other, from being seen to being judged.
I turn the canvas sideways as an image forms in my head. Not one painting, but two on the same canvas, side by side.
One is in color. Julie the way I see her, realistic, but with her aura of bliss that confounds me. But the second panel is black and white. Julie with a dirty rat on her shoulder, the brushstrokes savage and unhinged. Her face is a black smudge, her identity muted. The second panel is the way the world sees her, the fears and prejudices and assumptions about her exposed.
Two images, same woman.
A title comes to me: Seen/Not Seen.
I’m trembling, because I’ve never felt so right about a painting before, and I grin, because right now I don’t care what Krell thinks or if he likes it. This painting is mine.
I sketched us from the selfie Hayley sent me. In the drawing, we’re smiling, heads together, sunglasses holding back our hair—two girls spending a hot summer day at a beach club, not a care in the world.
But when I finished sketching, I dragged a flat white eraser across my face. My features muted, faded into the paper, until all that was left were memories of our friendship.
I’ve drawn dozens of pictures of Hayley, and even though this is one of the better ones, I can’t send it to her.
Hayley and I got together the last week before she headed east to Brown. We hadn’t seen each other since graduation, but she invited me to the beach club.
I picked out two lounge chairs on the sand under a big canvas umbrella and waited for Hayley to arrive. She blew onto the beach, and I leaped up into a hug that felt more theater than real.
Hayley asked if I’d had any trouble getting past the guys at reception and I told her no, they remembered me from last summer. I didn’t tell her I arrived an hour early so I could shave my legs in a hot shower and wash my hair.
Her phone kept buzzing, and in between texts she told me about who was with who and the parties I’d missed and graduation night at Disneyland.
She asked how it was living with Mom’s cousin Dolores, and I told her fine, but left out how I made Dolores up so Social Services wouldn’t get its hands on me.
Hayley asked how I was staying so skinny, and I told her about the diet where you eat for eight hours and fast for sixteen, but left out that I could only afford two meals a day, so it wasn’t hard to stay on.
She told me how she and her roommate were decorating their dorm room. I told her about the room I was moving into at Mrs. Mednikov’s, but left out how I hocked Mom’s guitar to pay the first month’s rent when I didn’t get my check from the Zoich in time.
When we ran out of things to say, Hayley asked if I wanted the staff to bring us some lunch, and I said I was craving a seared ahi salad.
I left out how the women I’d cleaned with all summer spoke no English so there were entire days when I barely spoke.
I left out how no one knew my name anywhere I went. How no one knew I was an artist, how no one had told me they loved me or told me they missed me in months.
I left o
ut how I spent my birthday taking in a free movie at a cemetery so I’d be surrounded by happy people.
I left out how this summer left me feeling erased.
My breakthrough on Seen/Not Seen has me so excited I have to fight the urge to bail on Kevin. There are so many assignments due this week, and only a few nights left in which to learn from Duncan, so giving up most of Sunday, the one day I have free to paint, is killing me, but I promised Kev I’d go on his mystery trip.
During the ten minutes while I wash up and brush my teeth, Kevin worms his way into Mrs. Mednikov’s kitchen. I emerge from the bathroom to find them chatting over coffee, a brown paper bag by his elbow that I suspect is full of the kolaches Mrs. Mednikov baked last night.
My face must convey my confusion. Kevin told me he’d message me when he got here. “Good morning?”
Mrs. Mednikov looks pleased with herself, but Kevin’s not so sure. “I hope you don’t mind,” he says. “Stephania invited me in.”
Stephania? Even I don’t use Mrs. Mednikov’s first name.
“I spied him creeping up my steps like a stray cat,” she says, deadpan.
Kevin waves his finger at her like they’ve been playing mah-jongg together for years and he knows her tricks. “All I did was put the newspaper on the step, and the security light came on.”
They’re both much more awake than I am. “I’ll be ready in five.”
“There’s no hurry,” Kevin calls as I retreat to my bedroom.
When I come out, Mrs. Mednikov tells me he’s outside warming up the car. “I like your young man,” she says.
“He’s not my—” She thinks he’s the guy I’m spending my evenings with, an assumption I don’t want to correct just yet. “Yeah, I like Kevin, too.”
Kevin’s got the Kia’s motor running, and he’s even stuck a pillow in my seat so I can sleep. “Front seat’s pretty cramped, but—”
“Trust me, I can sleep anywhere.” I settle in and prop the pillow against the door. “A two-hour drive? This had better be worth it.”
“I can’t promise, but I think you’ll thank me when we get there.”
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