“Do you remember Violetta?” Rain asked. She stayed on the lower level and watched the two of them up at the doorway. They were truly peers, his aging accelerated by illness and hers, impeded artificially, balancing out the unfair advantage older men have over their female counterparts.
“No, darling, no,” Violetta said.
James took the glass from her. “You look familiar,” he said, awkward but polite. He reached for her hand and lifted her fingers slightly short of the kiss that Violetta seemed to expect.
“We've never met,” she smiled coyly at him. “I arrange this to meet you.”
“I see⦔ James said warily, but without missing Violetta's playfulness. He let go of her hand and raised his eyebrows over toward Rain.
“I finish,” Violetta said with a sudden enthusiasm. “You chat, uh?”
Violetta turned back to the kitchen, only one helper accompanying her tonight. Morrow walked down the steps to the main room to join Rain and handed her the rumpled paper bag he was clutching. Inside were clumpy oil paint sticks. They were thick, like sidewalk chalk, but rough and very heavy. Dark, brilliant, intense blue.
“Lapis?” she asked, though she already knew.
James nodded.
“These are incredibly valuable,” Rain said with a crooked smile.
“And concentrated, yes,” he admitted. “But I happen to know somebody who makes them. I brought them to you because they're pre-worn and you can't get too precious about them. They'll look the same whether you keep them locked up or use them,” he continued, half playful, half gruff. “So you may as well use them.”
“Thank you,” Rain said. “They're beautiful.”
Violetta approached them with a plate of fig and crumbled goat cheese on tiny toasts. “You talk art now, and I make art in the kitchen,” she joked.
Rain shrugged off Violetta's giddiness and led James to the window facing the high wall where she had hung her paintings.
They looked distressingly themed to her this night. Too appropriate a backdrop for an All Hallows Eve.
Decorative
was the word that occurred to her, the devastating insult spat back and forth between realists and abstract artists. Realists charged abstractionists with making mere objects, design elements for a space lacking any content. Abstract painters, on the other hand, disdained pretty pictures as pointless and antiquated regurgitations of our most conventional minds. Straddling the two warring camps could cause an artist to volley opposing insults at herself and to confront her own worst self-assessment.
Morrow nodded. “So, do you think your work is changing?”
Rain looked down at her shoes. James hadn't seen her work before, only the small piece she'd given to him. Knowing she was more or less ready to bring them down to Ben Schuldenfrei in the city, she had thought she should be brave enough to let people see them tonight. This, however, wasn't the kind of reaction that she was looking for. “Well,” Rain said slowly. “I think I've finally completed something. Maybe I hurried to do it before it was gone.”
James appeared to consider this. Rain was familiar with flat and unenthusiastic responses like “interesting,” “different,” and “tell me about these,” but James seemed to know what he was seeing. “I think you can't help but do what you have to do,” he commented vaguely.
“You sound like my stepmother. âArt is a disease!' she always says,” Rain laughed. “Yeah, thanks.”
“More of a mixed blessing,” James said, without smiling. “A gift with a stiff price-tag.”
“You don't like them,” Rain said with a lightness she hoped would conceal her disappointment.
“I never said that. I wouldn't say that. They're accomplished.” James took a sip of his wine. “I'm afraid I'm afflicted with my own disease.”
Rain frowned, expecting to hear about his illness.
“No, no,” James said. “No, I am cursed with an inability to flatter. You shouldn't listen to me at all. I am just one viewer, really, it's meaningless.”
“Now I'm intrigued,” Rain said furrowing her brow. “Now you're going to have to tell me what you think!”
“Well,” James cleared his throat, “for example, I don't think that was meant for that canvas.” He pointed to the large abstract that she had previously planned as a landscape.
“You saw that the other day?” Rain asked.
“I saw the work you brought me. This is different. From another time perhaps?”
Rain was self-conscious. “I know, I know,” she agreed. “It's work I started when I was in the city. But I have a chance for a show, and I have to play that out, don't I?”
“I think the cart has to follow the horse,” Morrow said. “What you need to do is keep the horse happy. Give it what it needs. The career is the cart. The healthier the horse, the better carts she can pull. Things hop on,” he paused. “How far can I drag out this metaphor?”
Rain laughed uneasily, trying to appear light hearted about the whole endeavor. “Well, if I am just finishing up a haul here, I can't just dump it all off by the side of the road, can I?”
Morrow gave an enigmatic shrug which left Rain a bit deflated.
“Maybe it's⦔
“What?” Rain asked, as if she were preparing to take her punishment.
“I might simply have a prejudice toward purer, unmuddied⦔
“Oh!” Rain laughed. “Oh, the colors! Yes, I would imagine you wouldn't like the way I work so much. It's just a layering, a piling on. You can see hints of the original color if you look close.”
“I wouldn't mention it if I hadn't seen, hadn't seen⦔
“What, the little painting I gave you?”
“You have a rare understanding of color, of those colors,” James said solemnly.
“Oh,” Rain laughed a little more genuinely this time, trying to slough off his gravity. “Well, thanks.”
“That sensitivity can't be taught. It's a rare talent.” With that, James turned on his heel and abruptly marched back up toward the kitchen to offer help.
Rain stared at the paintings. These constructions. They may have started to get a little too skillful by the last one. Like a charicature of what began as an emotion. She couldn't tell if it was good or bad that her hand couldn't help learning a deftness with her technique. Did that deftness lessen the work, or did it enhance it? It was part of the dirty trick of personal discovery in art. Artists who kept to a singular subject and style risked losing freshness, losing their own thrill of discovery. But artists who switched media, styles and voices risked not ever developing an individual voice. Showing off skill either way can become mannered, tricked-up. Cubism? Yes, I can do that. Drips? Yup. Photo-realist ketchup bottles? Yes, that too. Sooner or later it devolved into wow-factor. It wasn't lack of talent: it was just that those hoop jumps began to say less and less until one's art became ultimately pedestrian. There was no comparing imitators to Picasso, Pollock or Goings. But staying in too narrow a style, even a style of one's own invention, risked becoming that same kind of inauthentic, unfelt labor. Of course, the most slap-dash Rothko would be gratefully received today, but artists work in an uncertain world. Art historians might find moments of self-assurance in artists' letters and journals; however, these same moments appear to be foolish ravings in the case of an unknown artist. When is a painting finished? When are you on the right track? Does your work speak to anyone? You don't know, and you can't.
Hooting and howling outside pulled Rain out of her reverie. The rest had arrived.
Violetta was directing her helper in the final touches, and the cocktails had loosened up the company. Violetta's newest boy, a day-trader named Mark, boomed with laughter and backslapping ease. He had collected Hunter and Marisol, the most handsome people at the party, and had them over by the iPod dock navigating around Rain's collection. Alvaro chatted with Morrow near the windows and Anne approached Rain at the bar table. She set her hip against the table near Rain, leaned in and looked toward her husband.
“I've never seen that man this far out of his safety zone,” she said quietly to Rain.
“Who, Alvaro?” Rain asked.
“No, Morrow,” Anne replied, sipping her wine. “He's a puzzle, that man. Alvaro thinks he's fascinatingâdamaged or something. His wife dying, maybe.”
“He does seem to go back and forth. Really friendly and interesting. Then suddenly shut down.”
“Alvaro likes to save broken birds,” Anne said with a fond shake of her head.
“Violetta hadn't met him before?” Rain asked.
“No, and she's been dying to. Maybe she's considering trying one out a little closer to her own age,” Anne said, glancing over at Brad or Todd or whatever his name was. “Too bad James is already taken.”
“He's got a girlfriend?” Rain asked, grinning and turning her back to the room.
“Remember? The yoga teacher?” Anne said, turning too. She opened another bottle of wine while Rain organized glasses.
“Oh, the yoga teacher,” Rain said.
“He hired her to do OT with the staff. Kind of a feng shui of holding your body while you work so you don't strain yourself,” she explained.
Rain shook her head. “How do you know everything that goes on around here?” she asked.
Anne laughed. “Well that one wasn't very hard. I've got an inside man⦔
Rain laughed with her.
It was unseasonably warm. The air had a softness warm enough to bring the aromas of the fallen leaves, so Rain had left the screen doors pulled across the front of the cabin, the big door tucked up into the roof.
“Bon appétit!” Violetta cried cheerfully, and everyone eagerly gathered at their carefully assigned place. Another aspect of Violetta's art was guest arrangement. Rain had witnessed it before anyone arrivedâshe had worked the seating chart of nine carefully, in the manner of an architect considering undergirding structures. She assessed the various personalities, creating the right mix. A few of her cardinal rules: separate couples, alternate men and women where possible. It was eye opening to Rain. Though she'd witnessed Gwen's quite accomplished entertaining, her approach had always been far more casual. Rain suspected this high-level calculation might be something that had gone on with Gwen, too, perhaps just a tad less conspicuously. Violetta clearly enjoyed every part of the process. She'd been at Rain's since early in the day, arranging vegetables to be chopped in pretty heaps like a cooking show, even carefully removing from sight stickers, bands and plastic bags to hide the mundane.
First course was local artisanal cheese and morel tart. The individually plated tarts had rough, turned edges and steamed lightly around a nest of wilted baby watercress and toasted pine nuts. The crusts were browned to a perfect gold, a depth of color ranging from the darkest crunchy edges to the lightest doughy depths, and the mushrooms settled into a dense, black, brown and white tangle inside.
Chassie had the unique ability to corral a proper dinner party conversation. Through the hum of chatter, it was Chassie's booming voice that unified the table saying, “Well that's that, you see? This generation doesn't believe in calling the world out on its bad behavior. Instead we blame ourselves for having a sour outlook and medicate our disappointment away. Soon there will be no more eccentrics in the world, eh, James?” She raised her glass to James.
“No,” Anne protested, uncharacteristically against the flow of conversation. “I don't believe that,” she said, shaking her head firmly and briefly silencing the table.
“I think,” she continued, “that people struggle more than you'd suspect, coming to terms with their disappointments in life. I think we don't let on what a struggle that often is.”
“That's where Chassie's point about eccentrics comes in, though,” Mark said. “Artists as a matter of fact,” he looked encouragingly at Rain and at Alvaro and Hunter.
“Right?” he asked. “You can't create when you're zoned out and in a happy place, right?”
“Nothing happens when it's truly dark,” Hunter countered. “All that romanticizing? We like our artists to burn bright and flame out?” Hunter wiped his mouth with his napkin and tossed it back into his lap. “Nah,” he said. “Musicians are only productive in a state of managing their weaknesses. I'd imagine it's the same for artists.” He let his eyes flash to Rain as he said this. Rain felt a zing through her veins as their eyes met. She tried to cover for it by sticking her wine glass up to her mouth, but then forgot what it was there for. Hid a smile behind it.
“Tell me,” Violetta said to James. “Do you take mood and meaning in consideration when you are producing a line?”
James appeared to consider this for a moment, looking down at his plate and pushing the food around with his fork. Then he raised his gaze to meet Violetta's eye. “You mean MY mood?” he asked lightly. He looked over at Alvaro. “I don't know, do I?”
“No, no,” Violetta said. “I mean the mood of color!”
“Colors have no moods,” James said flatly, looking back down at his plate.
“Surely you are familiar with color meanings and studies⦔
“Studies!” James said dismissively.
Violetta plowed onward, either not catching James cuts, or not permitting them. “Studies to show that pink is elevate the mood. Red is fire up the energy. Green is depressant and yellow is stimulating, I think, bile or the liver?” She surveyed the table as though appealing for back-up.
“Yellow,” James said. “Yellow. What is yellow? There are sour yellows and creamy yellows, sickly yellows and sunny yellows.”
“Golden,” Viloletta perservered earnestly. “A nice, golden yellow.”
“Sure,” James said. “A tone, a single note or maybe even a chord can be said to be sad or wistful or maniacal. But once you put it into a context, it is simply there to serve the whole. Even in color-field work, where a single color is the main player, the color is still in context. The lighting, the frame, where and how it is hung, it all works as a system for better or for worse. Ideally for some purpose, I suppose⦔