Highland Morrow Art Materials folded small-print health warnings into every box of their paints, but James Morrow, artist's colorman, owner and operator of the business his great-grandfather had started in England in the 1840s, and whose family before that had served as colormen to some of the great portraitists of the realm, refused to update his materials. No water-based oils. No fume-less turpenoid. And absolutely no pthalo, quinacridone, dioxazine, napthol or hansa pigments would ever synthetically tint Morrow's colors.
Highland Morrow wasn't for all artists. High prices and a fairly limited selection of materials put many painters off, but to conservators, forgers, and a growing number of artists who thought of their materials as a meaningful contribution to the final product, Highland Morrow was the only source.
Morrow, in his uniform of charcoal sweater, black jeans and boots, moved among his employees dressed in theirs of white jackets and paper hats. He checked the texture of the malachite, stabbing a clean palette knife into the bucket and rubbing it across a card lying in a stack kept nearby for this purpose. He tilted the card in the light, eyeing it for hue, texture and covering power. He jutted his chin at Alvaro. “You put it through again?”
“Yeah, boss,” Alvaro said, smiling.
“I think you got it. How about the ochres?”
“They're holding steady. I laid you out all the cards over here.” Alvaro went back to the mulling table where a dozen cards were carefully arranged, each with the same cryptic brushstrokes. On every card a single red stroke smeared downward from thick to thin over a printed line, dark to light like a stormy red sky above the sea and a milky orb of the color, fifty-fifty with titanium white, hovering next to it.
Morrow pulled his dark eyeglass frames down his long nose and checked the cards. He rearranged them a little. He held two up under a lamp and then angled them toward the window.
“Looks like you have it, Alvaro,” he said quietly. “It's good.”
Alvaro looked up at Morrow. He noticed that Morrow was unusually slow moving, standing still, not looking at anything in particular.
“You need something, boss?” he asked.
Morrow appeared not to have heard him. He didn't move and Alvaro didn't either. All the employees were accustomed to Morrow's brief “holidays,” a term housepainters use for missed spots. If these got to be too long, Alvaro would ask again, but this time Morrow came back repeating what Alvaro had asked him. “Need something?” he murmured, sounding vaguely present. “Uh, there's a bottle in my office, Alvaro. Prescription bottle by the lamp. I'd appreciate that, my man.”
Morrow continued around the room taking readings from thermometers, stirring thick oily liquids and checking inside the doors of enormous room-sized kilns, while Alvaro hopped lightly up the spiral staircase to Morrow's perched second-floor loft office. The room was dark except for a small lamp on the desk, but bottles and jars of detrita lined the walls on narrow shelves. Blown-glass and metal contraptions crowded the room's corners. A large, black-leather couch lay against the back wall, mostly obscured by stacks of papers and books.
Alvaro found the bottle on the desk, and picking it up, noticed a photo behind it, illuminated by a little halo of light by the desk lamp above. It was a yellowed picture of a beautiful young woman. She was lively and hopeful, her long hair cut in thick bangs hanging over her pretty face, partly hiding what looked like a smile. She held a couple of paint brushes toward the camera, accusingly.
Through the office windows, the view down onto the factory floor was broad, and from this vantage point the well-worn antiquity of the place was enlivened by fields of pure pigment lying in trays, buckets and bags all over the room. Powders, liquids and oils of contrasting hues created a sharp counterpoint to the calm of the browns and grays of the equipment. Alvaro saw them as can-can dancers cavorting in a monastery.
Sliding back down the railing of the spiral staircase, Alvaro bounded over to his boss to deliver the bottle.
G
WENDOLYN BROOKER GALLERIES was painted in subtle tan Helvetica caps on the plate glass window. Behind the glass stood a bare white wall with a single large white canvas hanging on it. Blank mostly, until closer inspection revealed that the meandering marks were purposeful; they were what the artwork amounted to. A freshly gessoed canvas manhandled with haphazard smears and gouges.
A three-person show was opening that night. The artists' families and friends crowded the place, along with the usual varieties of New Yorkers whom art openings attract.
There were the shabby art students hoarding free wine and cheese, and there were the citizen art fans whose interest in art was far deeper than their pockets. There was the occasional collector or critic intensely sought by gallery owners, but whose appearances at openings were rare. They were easily identifiable; they never touched the wine or cheese.
Rain Morton Madlin wandered around the various species and genuses in attendance, trying to see the works through their eyes and eavesdropping on conversations. Looking about a decade younger than her years, Rain had a raw-edges openness about her and was pretty in an unself-conscious way. Her hair hung long and clean but carelessly unflattened; untrimmed bangs dipped into her large, liquid eyes. Her wide mouth betrayed a sadness floating around her that she buoyed with a resolute positivity.
Rain neared a couple, the man clearly here under protest, the woman attempting to hold her ground against him.
“â¦total crap. I mean I know it's a cliché, but my kidâno, my DOG could do this,” he blurted.
“But the question is
would
your dog do this?” the woman asked.
“Exactly my point!”
“I think that was MY point.”
Rain allowed a smile to creep up on her face, letting on she had heard them.
“I mean, right?” the man said to Rain, just before she passed by.
“What's that?” Rain asked politely.
“I'm saying, who really likes this? Bodily fluid art, porn, preserved animals. Art that the artist never lays a hand on. It's like a big joke.”
“I like them,” Rain remarked, surveying the space.
The man and his companion laughed as though she were joking.
“I do, I like them and I don't think the amount of effort that went into a particular piece has anything to say about its value.” Rain kept her tone light. “I know it's unfair, but I think it's true.”
“Right, right,” the man agreed. “You can't convince me it's any good and I can't convince you it's crap. Eye of the beholder. But you would spend your hard-earnedâI mean you're okay with the obscene amounts of money spent on these when, you know, starving children and all that?”
“Yes,” Rain said.
The man shook his head wearily.
Rain pressed on, “I think the prices are reasonable. It's expensive to sel art. The gal ery owners spend tons on space to show the work, and on events and overseas art shows and catalogs and ads. Then, of course, there are the artists, spending their livesâ”
“Still seems high,” the man interrupted.
“If you're asking do I think it's worth spending large sums of money on art, I'd have to say yes.”
“The diamond skull?”
“Oh, I can name better ones than that. I like the two-million dollar, mile-long pole speared into the earth,” she said, “with only a small inscribed disk visible.” Rain laughed. “At least you can
see
the diamonds, huh?”
Rain knew it was one of those conversations not much worth having. Most art-world people would just have moved right past. It's nothing they haven't all heard before, loudly, angrily, sometimes drunkenly, but usually self-assuredly as if these objections were original. She wasn't sure why she had engaged the guy, but despite being so steeped in the art world, Rain could see how it looked to people on the outside. She was deep enough in not to have to make bristly excuses for it, but she'd also thought a lot about the merits of spending her life doing something that few, if any, would ever be able to appreciate. “I assume you go to movies?” she asked.
“Mmmm,” the man answered.
“Think about the money spent on those. Each has its audience. The millions spent on some of thoseâand some of them everybody agrees are total turkeysâthat money eclipses any one of the craziest sounding art prices. Ultimately, I think engaging people's minds is worthwhile.”
The woman piped in. “And the very fact that it isn't mainstream, that it
is
quirky and odd and provocative, for some people that's worth something right there.”
Rain smiled at the woman, understanding her meaning, but not quite joining in. “And really, some of the pieces were incredibly time consuming to make, if that's what interests you.”
“You're probably one of the artists!” the man said with a laugh.
Rain smiled.
The woman put her hand over her mouth and the man blushed. “Which ones?” he asked.
Rain pointed across the room and as the man started to speak again, saying those, those he liked, those weren't the ones he had meant, Rain just moved along nodding and waving, heading toward the back room.
In such a fresh, clean space, Rain's paintings looked almost unfamiliar to her. She was proud of them, but they were like her movie star clients, and she their plastic surgeon. She knew them in their becoming, in their guts and raw vulnerability.
Nothing in the man's criticisms particularly bothered her. If he'd been dragged to almost any art school in America, any biennial, any contemporary art institute, he'd realize Rain was actually laughably antiquated in her use of actual paint. Actual pigment in oil applied to actual canvas on stretcher bars. For most critics, her own husband among them, Rain's work was almost quaint in its attachment to these materials. But for Rain, ultimately, making art was never a matter that required defending. It was what made her feel most human, most alive. Marking canvas with silken paint globules took her out of herself and her mind and into the materials and smells and the textures of the weave of canvas, the skim of gesso, the landscape of oil and pigment. It was pleasure and meaning and hope and acceptance.
In the back office of the gallery a bottle of decent scotch perched on the desk between Gwendolyn Brooker herself and a gentleman dressed in an Armani suit and cowboy boots. He was laughing and easy; she was leaning toward him, trying unsuccessfully to cover her tension. Gwen pointedly set down her glass.
“Joss, Joss, Joss,” she said, speaking fast but low. “How many years have we known each other?”
Joss Harp took this as an invitation and grabbed her knee in his big, fleshy hand.
Gwen went on as though he'd answered her, “And in all those years have I ever steered you wrong?”
Harp winked, and then patted and released her tiny knee. “Not so as I can tell, you haven't.”
“Then trust me on this one: it's an important piece, a smart invâ”
Harp interrupted her. “Not prepared to buy just today. Having to be a bit more conservative in these
times
.” Harp downed his scotch and then plunked his empty glass down on the desk next to Gwen's.
“But Joss⦔ Gwen began energetically, refilling his glass as she spoke.
“Just gonna slow down there a little, is all. Just a little risk aversion thing, you understand. But you must be doing okay, Gwenny, huh? What with all them foreigners you been selling to past couple of years?”
Gwen screwed the top back on the bottle and cradled it in her lap. “I can't help feeling sorry that our best works are flying overseas. There used to be important collectors in this country. Passionate people, visionaries.”
Joss picked up his refilled glass, drank it down in one go and stood. He adjusted his belt over his full belly, shoving his shirt deep into his pants. “Honey, begging doesn't suit you,” he said with a sudden turn in tone. With that, he screwed his hat onto his head and exited on big confident strides. As he passed through the viewing room, the big man noted Rain standing there. He touched the brim of his hat and took her in unabashedly. “Be seein' you,” he said and strolled through the crowds and out of the gallery.
Rain pivoted around the doorway and into Gwen's office. “
Gwenny
?” she said incredulously.
Gwen looked down to find the bottle of scotch still in her hands. She returned it onto her desk. “You know, I USED to be good at this,” she commented with vague irony.
“Come on, now,” Rain said, gathering the glasses and bottle and putting them away.
Gwen didn't notice what Rain was doing; she was so accustomed to being served.
“That man is a boor,” Gwen declared, smoothing her Missoni dress and rubbing a hand down her fine, still-shapely calf.
“No sale?” Rain asked.
“Twice a year I shipped out crates of important works so he could
view
them,” Gwen complained. She stood and came through her office door with Rain. “Funny how he always shopped for art right before one of those famous parties of his. All very impressive, showing off dozens of important works on your vacation home walls. He even had the nerve to invite me once.” Gwen shook her head. “And I actually went! The Hamptons. Everyone there thought I was raking it in.”
“I always thought he bought.”
“One. He'd return all but one. Now he won't even do the one,” she said. “I'm getting out.”
“We've all heard that before,” Rain said.
“I'm serious. Rain, you should really forget about painting. It's not a smart move right now. Don't do it if you don't have to.”
Rain rolled her eyes and said flatly, “I have to.”
Gwen insisted, “I mean it. Don't do it. It's a disease.”
“Yes, it's a disease,” Rain echoed with a sigh.
Gwen smiled tiredly, “Alright. I'm getting senile. Just wheel me out into the storage space and cover me in bubble wrap.”