“But if you’re going to do this, I can’t just walk out on you,” Izzy told him. “I can’t let you go through it alone.”
Rushkin shook his head in slow amazement. “You have a spirit as generous as it is talented,” he said.
Izzy lowered her head as a hot flush rose up her neck and spread across her cheeks.
“I will phone my doctor this afternoon,” Rushkin said, “and ask him to refer me to someone as soon as possible. Still, I think we should take a break for a few weeks.”
“But –”
Rushkin smiled and wagged a finger at her. “You’ve been working hard and you deserve a rest. You can return in the new year.”
“You’ll be okay?”
Rushkin nodded. “With the faith you’ve shown me, how could I be otherwise?”
Izzy surprised herself as well as him then. Before he was quite aware of what she was doing, she stepped up to him and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. “Merry Christmas, Vincent,” she said, and then she fled.
II
Newford, May 1974
Feeney’s Kitchen was busy Friday night, crowded and loud. Smoke hung thick in the air and not all of it originated from tobacco. On stage a four-piece Celtic group called Marrowbones was ripping through a set of Irish reels, and the small dance floor was filled with jostling bodies attempting their own idiosyncratic versions of Irish step dancing, flinging themselves about with great and joyous abandon.
Izzy sat at a table near the back with Kathy and Jilly, enjoying the raucous mood for all that it made conversation next to impossible. It was only when the band took a break that they could talk with any hope of understanding each other. After the waitress brought them another pitcher of beer, the conversation got around to a discussion of the benefits of a fine arts curriculum at a university such as Butler, as opposed to an apprenticeship under an established artist. Izzy, being the only one of the three involved in both, found herself elaborating on one of Rushkin’s theories, which brought cries of elitism from both her companions.
“That’s where Rushkin’s got it all wrong,” Jilly argued. “There’s no one way to approach art; there’s no right way. So long as you apply yourself with honesty and create from the heart, the end result is truthful. It might not be good, per se, but it still has worth. And I think that goes for any creative endeavor.”
“Amen,” Kathy said.
“But without the proper technique, you don’t have the tools to work with.”
Jilly nodded. “Sure. I agree with that. You can teach technique; just as you can teach art history and theory. But you can’t teach the use to which a person puts their technique and theory. You can’t tell someone what to have in their heart, what they need to express.”
“You mean their passion,” Izzy said.
“Exactly. You can nurture it in somebody, but you can’t teach it.”
Over the course of the past nine months, Izzy had begun to approach the heart of Rushkin’s alchemical secret in her own work; she could feel something opening up inside her, the way a window seemed to open in a canvas sometimes and the painting almost appeared to create itself. But she’d also come to accept the truth of what Rushkin had meant about a new language being required to explain it.
She wanted to share what she was learning with her friends, especially with Jilly since it so specifically applied to the visual arts, but as they sat here talking she realized that they really didn’t have access to the same lexicon she had come to acquire studying under Rushkin. And without it, she was helpless to do more than fumble for words that simply didn’t exist.
“But what if you could teach passion?” she asked. “What if there was a way to take a piece of yourself and put it into the canvas?”
“But isn’t that what art’s all about?” Jilly said.
“The same goes for writing,” Kathy added.
“Yes, I know,” Izzy said. “But what if that process could be taught?”
Jilly topped off their glasses from the beer pitcher and took a sip from her own. “If Rushkin’s been telling you that, he’s pulling a scam. I’ll grant you that working with an artist of his caliber, you couldn’t help but feel you were privy to secret techniques, but when it comes down to the crunch, everything worth anything still has to originate from inside yourself.”
But it does, Izzy wanted to tell her. It’s just with what I’m learning, that process is so much more intense, and the end result so much closer to the original vision. But she knew it was pointless. They’d been having variations on this conversation for a couple of months now, but their disparate vocabularies remained an insurmountable barrier.
“All language was one, once,” Rushkin had explained to her when he was in one of his conversational moods. “Then we tried to not only touch God, but to think of ourselves as gods as well, and our tower was brought tumbling down about our ears. It wasn’t just language that splintered on that day, but all the arts. We lost our ability to communicate in every medium – not just with words – and that original language has all but vanished from the world.
“What we’re doing here in this studio is trying to reclaim a portion of the original language, an echo of it. We are desperate voices, trapped in Babylon, seeking what we lost and coming close – so very close; that and no more. Imagine what we could do if we could actually learn to speak that ancient tongue.”
It made so much sense when Rushkin spoke to her of it, but Izzy couldn’t seem to translate it when she tried to repeat what she was learning to her friends.
“You should attend more of Dapple’s lectures next year,” Jilly said. “Just before the finals he got us all into this really interesting dialogue about what we were doing with our art, where we wanted to go with it and why.”
Izzy gave up trying, as she invariably did, and went with the new turn their conversation had taken.
“You really like Professor Dapple, don’t you?”
“He’s been great to me,” Jilly said. “He’s even going to let me use one of his spare rooms as a studio over the summer. Someone else was using it last year and they left behind all kinds of supplies. He said I could use whatever I wanted for myself.”
Kathy laughed. “Sounds like he’s got the hots for you.”
“Oh, please.”
“Well, really.”
Jilly shook her head. “What about you, Izzy?” she asked. “Are you going to work at Rushkin’s studio full time until school starts up next year?”
“Actually, I don’t know if I’m going back to school next year.”
“That’s the first I’ve heard of this,” Kathy said. “What’s going on?”
Izzy sighed. “My scholarship’s dependent on my keeping up my grades and I was stretched so thin this year that all I managed was a C-minus average. That’s not enough, so the scholarship’s been cut off. I won’t be able to afford to go back in the fall.”
“What about your parents?” filly asked.
“They don’t have any money, or if they do, they’re not telling me about it. They think I’m wasting my time anyway.”
“But your work’s so good. Did you tell them about Rushkin choosing you and how he’s never taken on a student before? Well,” she added, “at least none that anybody I know has ever heard of. I’ve learned more about him from you than I think any of our art history profs know.”
“I told them,” Izzy said, “but my father’s really down on the whole idea of my becoming an artist. My mother’s not so bad, but he’s basically written me off as a lost cause. We don’t talk about it anymore. Actually, we don’t talk anymore, period.”
“You should have told me,” Kathy said.
“I didn’t know how to,” Izzy said. “It means I have to leave residence, and I’m going to miss you so much, that I just …” She shrugged helplessly.
“We’ll get a place together,” Kathy said. “Off campus. Alan says there’s all these really cheap bachelors and lofts available on Waterhouse Street. He’s planning to
move into one himself on the fifteenth.”
“I’m living in a rooming house just a couple of blocks north,” Jilly said. “It’s a great area, cheap but still pretty. There’s all sorts of artists and musicians living around there. You’d love it, Izzy.”
Kathy nodded. “We’ll be a real community. And you could get a student loan.”
“I don’t know.”
“And you could sell some of your paintings,” Jilly said. “You must have a ton of them by now. I know a gallery you could show them to. I can’t guarantee they’d take them, but you could try.”
“Or sell them down by the Pier to the tourists,” Kathy said.
Jilly nodded. “Sophie sells pen-and-ink sketches of Newford landmarks there on the weekends and she says sometimes she makes a real killing.”
Izzy regarded her friends through a film of tears that blurred her gaze. She’d been so depressed, trying to figure out how to break the news to Kathy, trying to figure out what she was going to do for money. She wanted to stay in the city to be close to her friends and keep studying under Rushkin. She wanted to finish her B.A. at Butler. But mostly she refused to crawl back to the farm, dragging her tail between her legs and proving her father right.
“You guys are so great,” she said. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.” Kathy took her hand and gave it a squeeze. “That’s what friends are for, ma belle Izzy. Don’t worry. Everything’s going to work out fine.”
III
“Jilly’s got this friend at a gallery who’ll look at my work, you see,” Izzy said.
She eyed Rushkin nervously, but he merely nodded a “yes, go on” in response. His features gave away nothing of what he was thinking, which only made Izzy feel more jittery. Although he hadn’t hit her again since that last time just before Christmas, some things hadn’t changed. He was still dictatorial and bad-tempered, needing very little provocation to launch into a scathing tirade of verbal abuse. She’d tried to be supportive about his therapy, but he simply wouldn’t discuss it, and though it was true that he hadn’t laid a hand on her again, there were many times she went home in tears. She would sit up, unable to sleep, trying to understand why she put up with all she did from him, vowing that she’d have it out with him, once and for all. Except invariably, once she arrived at the studio the next day, he’d be warm and supportive, and all her good intentions would drain away, if not her confusion.
He had a hold on her that went beyond their student-teacher relationship and she knew it wasn’t healthy. She admired him tremendously for his talent and his insight and his dedication to his art, but he also seemed to mesmerize her, and in so doing, exacted far too much control over her. His moods ruled their relationship, and she often got a headache trying to second-guess what he was thinking or how he would react to even the most innocuous comment or incident.
It had taken all her courage this morning to bring up the question of taking some of her work into a gallery, and even so, she could only approach it by a circuitous route.
“So I thought maybe I’d do that,” she went on, “because I’m really broke and I need the money to get an apartment.”
She kept expecting him to explode into one of his rages, but his features remained a bland mask. His apparent calm fed her jumpiness, making it increasingly more difficult for her to go on, never mind actually come right out and ask him what she wanted. In the end, all she could do was stand there beside her easel, fiddling with a cleaning rag, unable to finish.
“And how is it that I enter the equation?” Rushkin finally asked.
“Well, the only paintings I have that are any good – that I think are any good – are here.”
“And you want me to help you choose which ones to take in?”
Was it going to be this easy? Izzy thought. Unable to trust her voice, she nodded in response.
“What was the name of the gallery again?”
“The … Green Man.”
“I see,” Rushkin said. And then he said the last thing she’d been expecting. “Well, I think it would be an excellent venue – not so highbrow that your work might be diminished in comparison to that of their more established artists, yet with enough of a reputation to ensure that the paintings will be viewed with some seriousness.”
“You mean, it’s okay?”
“Your ability has been progressing by leaps and bounds,” Rushkin told her, “and I think you are due some recompense for the dedication you’ve shown to date.”
Thank God she’d caught him in a good mood, Izzy thought.
“Besides,” he added with a smile. “I can’t have you sleeping in alleyways. Think of what it would do for my studio’s reputation if the word ever got out that I drove my best student into penury.”
The morning took on a surreal quality for Izzy. From Rushkin’s actually cracking a joke, to his helping her choose and frame a half-dozen paintings, none of it seemed real. It was as though she’d strayed into an alternate world where everything was almost, but not quite, the same. She wasn’t complaining, though. The Rushkin of this hypothetical other world was such good company that she wanted to stay here with him forever.
Still, obliging and good-natured as he was, the old Rushkin hadn’t entirely disappeared. The choices he made seemed so arbitrary at times that Izzy couldn’t fathom what his reasoning might be. More than once he would pass over a preferable painting for one that Izzy knew was clearly inferior by comparison.
The ones he picked weren’t bad by any means; they just weren’t the best of what she’d done.
“What about this one?” she dared to ask, when Rushkin set aside the painting she’d done of the oak tree outside her dorm at the university. She was particularly proud of how it had all come together, from the first value sketches all the way through to the final painting on canvas.
But Rushkin shook his head. “No. That one has a soul. You must never sell a work that has a soul.”
“But shouldn’t they all have soul?” Izzy asked. “I mean, to be any good?”
“You confuse painting with heart with a painting having heart. Artists must always put the whole of themselves into their work for it to have any meaning – this, I think, we can agree to be a given. But sometimes a painting takes on a spirit of its own, independent of what we have brought to it. Such works require our respect and should never be treated as a commodity.”
Izzy looked around the studio at the vast array of Rushkin’s paintings that hung from the walls and were stacked in untidy piles throughout. “Is that why these are here?” she asked.
Rushkin smiled. “Some. The rest are failures.”
“I’d give my eye teeth to be able to produce ‘failures’ like these,” Izzy said.
Rushkin made no response.
“Why don’t you show your work anymore?” Izzy wanted to know. The air of easy companionship in the studio this morning was making her feel bold.
“I’m no longer hungry,” he replied.
“But it’s not just about making a living, is it?” Izzy said, shocked at his response. “That’s not why we do this.”
Rushkin looked at her with interest. “Then why do you paint?”
“To communicate. To share the way I see the world.”
“Ah. But to whom do you communicate? Or rather, which is more important: your viewing audience – those potential purchasers – or Art itself?”
“I’m not sure I follow what you’re saying. How can we communicate with art?”
“Not with art,” Rushkin said, “but the spirit of art. The muse who whispers in our ears, who cajoles and demands and won’t be silent or leave us in peace until we have done her will.”
He gave her an expectant look, but Izzy didn’t know how to reply to that. She knew about being inspired – what most people meant when they spoke of a muse – but Rushkin spoke as if it was an actual person who came to him and wouldn’t let him rest until she’d gotten what she needed from him.
“You’ll see,” Rushkin told
her after a few moments.
“What’ll I see?”
But Rushkin was finished with that conversation now. “It’s a good thing we’ve had you working in such standard sizes,” he said. “I think I have finished frames for all the pieces we’ve chosen. Help me bring them up from the storeroom, will you?”
Izzy knew better than to press any further. She followed him downstairs and they spent the remainder of the morning framing the paintings Rushkin had chosen and carefully wrapping each of them for transit.
“How were you planning to take them to the gallery?” Rushkin asked when they were finally done.
“My friend Alan’s waiting for me to call. He’s going to drive me over.”
When Alan arrived, Rushkin helped them lug the paintings down to Alan’s car. He shook hands with Alan, wished Izzy good luck, then disappeared back into his studio before Izzy had time to thank him for all his help. She adjusted the paintings in the backseat of Alan’s Volkswagon one last time, then got into the passenger’s seat beside him.
“So that’s Rushkin,” Alan said as they pulled away from the curb. Izzy nodded.
“He’s not at all like what I expected.”
Izzy glanced over at him. “What were you expecting?”
“I thought he’d be more like that drawing you showed me of him last year.”
“Like it how?”
“Well, more grotesque, I suppose. I didn’t realize you’d done a caricature.”
“But I didn’t do a caricature …”
“Whoops,” Alan said. He gave a quick embarrassed laugh. “I guess I put my foot in my mouth this time, didn’t I? Look, don’t pay any attention to me, Izzy. What the hell do I know about art? Hey, are you and Kathy really planning to get a place on my block?”
“If we can afford it.”
She let him steer the conversation away, but she couldn’t get what he’d said out of her mind. She knew that all artists had blind spots in how they perceived their own work, thinking it better than it was, or worse, but she hadn’t thought that she could have gone that far astray when she’d redone her sketch of Rushkin last September. Granted, she hadn’t had him sitting in front of her the way he’d been in the original drawing that he’d taken away with him when he left, but still …
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