Thanks To Carolyn

Thanks to Carolyn

“Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.”

-Pablo Picasso

Perhaps it didn’t matter where I started, as long as I got through the whole thing, but something about her hands called to me. Folded so neatly, resting with light grace on the arm of her chair, such a simple and elegant gesture. Crrrkkt went my cheap scissors, slicing her hands away. They fell to the table, perhaps even more beguiling on their own, the softness of her subtly detailed fingers a glowing contrast to the scarred plastic beneath.

Her eyes stay fixed on me as I lay the first morsel on my tongue, that shade of her smile, that fraction, unflinching as I begin to chew through the fibers beneath her flesh.

Less bitter than that vase full of Sunflowers, less sour than that bizarre elephant and its spindly little legs. Maybe it was her advanced age, the centuries tempering a flavor that may have been harsh when she was fresh and young and bright, and full of new life.

I didn’t expect her to taste like this.

To tell this story truthfully, I must make this very clear: It was never about the money.

My inheritance wasn’t worth comparing to what you might read about in the social columns, and not even much next to the trend brokers that flutter and giggle and brag their way around the gallery halls they’ve bought with what their own parents left them. My own mother and father had simply died before their time, cancer both, and instead of going to a decade or two of peaceful retirement in the Keys their modest few million passed to me, and to my passions.

We’d never lived large anyway. I’d payed off my own apartment years before their passing, and gained no ambition to lay my sudden windfall down on bigger windows somewhere closer to the do-nothing nobodies that live downtown. What mattered, after I’d seen to their last arrangements, was that I could finally focus on what I lived for, and that the distractions of meaningless labor could finally be set aside. I would have a name. My work would be seen, admired and discussed in surprised and wondrous tones by people that understand what it means to pull pieces of yourself out into the world and set them into something beautiful. Yes, I had time, and the luxury to focus, and the only measure of success I ever cared about was at last resting comfortably in my own two hands.

The only problem, I had come to understand, was that I had no talent to speak of.

Realism had drawn me in first, from my first school trip to New York. The masters not only showed life as it was, but as vibrant and flawed and human as it could possibly be. They were awake, these paintings. Alive. They hummed in their frames, existing on a plane elevated from our own by an unbridgable fraction, and called to me from across the gulf, and I knew that my fate had been made.

My first classes weren’t a disaster, exactly. I’d been taught young that new skills don’t come easy, that ability has nothing to do with your start, that everything and everyone is judged on how they end up. And I believed it, and I took failure better than most, and I practiced. Years of sketches on every scrap of paper, my fingers callousing to any and every implement that would leave a mark or pigment, and when my desk and my closet were full and my efforts took over our small house and became inescapable I got rid of them, and started again, and filled our lives with pictures and paintings even faster than before.

By the time I graduated high school hardly anything I made was unmarked by tears of shame and frustration. The pieces I produced had improved over the years, of course they had, but with no other task in my heart since I was ten I couldn’t understand why nothing ever looked quite right. It wasn’t execution, that I knew, as even my peers and teachers and whoever I could rope into an armchair critique told me how stunning, how perfect, how flawless my recreations were. But they were only that, only recreations. The pieces I produced day by day were snapshots of reality that were a step above everyone I knew, and beyond all the works I could search out with my limited means, but that last spark of life that I’d seen that first day in the museum had always refused to ignite.

For a while I had hope that college would be better. I’d only applied to one, a state school a few hours closer to the City that punched above its weight in the Visual Arts program. I found myself surrounded by others who worked and slept and ate in a world of graphite smudges and the sweet miasma of paint thinner. Not like me maybe, not exactly, but I recognized in most the same missing piece in their heart; they had also seen something, perhaps on a day further back than their own memories could reach, and like me they walked the campus haunted by its ghost.

Carolyn was one such person.

She was a true artist at heart, and the consummate student of her craft. Her specialty was painting, like me, and had spent the whole of her young life grappling the line between abstraction and Impressionism into something she could control. But mastery was never her intent; she seduced her inspiration, tamed it with patience and cunning and quiet, confident persistence that made my bull-headed attempts to dominate Art itself feel hopelessly childish in comparison. Most of my life I’d been hacking at the mediums I loved with brute force, stripping skill by skill from them like veins of ore in a mountain to be collected and refined, but not Carolyn. Like all accomplished trainers of fierce and capricious beasts, she persuaded the object of her ambition to work with her as a partner, acting under her will and guidance but with the power of its own instinct as a driving force.

I saw her at work late one evening, down in her corner of the class studio, locked with her canvas in a dance of sensuous understanding. I was in rapture as I watched, my shameful stare totally unnoticed to her, lost as she was in act, but it wasn’t her or even the painting that I burned all over with my longing gaze. My eyes stuck so long to the scene that they blurred, and there was no focus, and I needed none, for what I watched was only the space between them. The space I had never left between my work and myself, the space I had filled so completely with effort and desire that my long-sought spark was smothered before it could ever take flight. Watching her there, stuck to the spot and howling in revelation, I knew why the things she brought into being lived and breathed, and why mine would never be so. It was that painting, the one Carolyn left the on the easel to dry, that I consumed first.

That night I stayed in the studio, and went back to my canvas, and for the first time in my life I brought something living into the world with my own hands. I set to the fibers the abstracted image of a young woman at work, a vision between waking life and the deepest swirling depths of a dream, and I felt the space between us fill with a breath so rich and intoxicating that I can’t bring myself to recollect a single moment until I stepped away. I left my work there, wet and shining with brilliance beyond the oil that was its form, and wandered across the campus in a daze.

I woke in the early grey of the morning, covered in dew, rising slow on a bench along the pond in the middle of the campus quad. In a rush of quiet panic I returned to the studio to set eyes on the thing I knew was mine but couldn’t bring to my mind, and was met not with a few tired students but the backs of a murmuring crowd, packed together around the spot that was my destination. The room was full of their tension, their soft voices and pointing fingers that traced graceful lines in the air, and hands that swirled and spread to articulate what they were attempting to describe.

Listen to their surprise, screamed my thoughts, can you hear the wonder in their voices?

It was mine that they saw, that they marveled at, that they tried and failed and tried again to describe without feeling they had really expressed what they saw, and felt. It was mine. Then it struck me; surely someone in this crowd would recognize my station, and point me out to the crowd, and I would be faced with all these people, trapped in a dream that I had never prepared myself to live out. Electrified, and with a sudden terror rising in my belly, I turned hard away and dashed unthinking to my room.

A week would pass before I had the courage to return to the studio. When I arrived it was clear my painting was gone. No surprise, I thought, and even a relief. In my isolation I’d heard no word of its fate, and anyway I’d rid myself of countless pieces and always made more. I hadn’t come to claim it, but again to feel what I’d always wished for, and been granted once already. Setting fresh canvas to the eisel I took up my brushes, and began to paint, and felt immediately that something was wrong. My hand moved sure and smooth, and the pigment obeyed my commands, but I felt nothing of the breath that so took me that night a week before.

Where was the feeling?

I closed my eyes and took a moment, reaching out into the space between me and my piece with my mind. Nothing was there. Hours passed, and other students came and went, and all would seem ordinary from outside, but all the way through to what I knew was the painting’s end the sensation of living creation eluded me. I stepped away from my canvas and looked at what I had made, technically perfect, but inspired only in principle. It had all the character of my own living force, transferred without error onto dead fiber, but none of its own. I left it where it stood, and walked out of the studio, and never returned.

That was more than 20 years ago now, and things have changed.

I never did see Carolyn again, or any work of her caliber that I could lay hands on, but my parent’s death had laid an opportunity at my feet I’d waited a lifetime to claim, and with it the beginnings of a plan. A few million dollars will buy a lot of plane tickets. It will also rent a lot of cars, and pay for a lot of hotel rooms. It will bribe a lot of docents, and placate a lot of unseemly professionals with the skills that I needed but had no spare time or focus to develop on my own. It will pay for a lot of shipping containers, and falsified travel documents, and establish enough testimony of my whereabouts on a given day to suit my requirements. A few million dollars will buy you nearly anything, but it cannot buy Talent, and it cannot buy Inspiration. It also cannot buy the greatest works of art the world has ever seen, not by a long measure, but I had a working mind and a motive that burned at my insides with a brilliant and life-giving flame. And, thanks to Carolyn, I knew that one would never be enough.