Seminal Work

I’m starting to rethink the wisdom behind the decision to take a half day today rather than burning an entire day of PTO. Between waiting until lunch to hustle out of work today and the type of public transportation that enables entire authoritarian regimes to rise to power, I am going to be late.

My tardiness is going to do nothing to combat the perceived flakiness of artists, even if the hope that my planned professional demeanor would combat that reputation was the kind of baseless optimism that can easily lead to accusations of flakiness in its own right. The place of the artist in society, in as much as we have a place at all, has been relegated to such a dusty corner of eccentricity that being considered flaky is probably a generous upgrade from the assumption of madness.

Art itself may not be madness, but still considering yourself an artist after all that has happened probably comes close. Look at me now, I’ve been thrown the smallest scrap of something that looks marginally like the future that I had pictured for myself and here I am tearing through the streets like, yes, a mad woman.

All of this rushing manages to have me rolling into the lobby at something resembling on time, even if I do still have an elevator ride, and a trek down the hallway in front of me that will qualify me as late, but not seriously so. That elevator ride turns out to be a blessedly solitary one that can be used to take several deep calming breaths to rein in my out-of-control nervous system, and a few dabs at my forehead with a tissue to keep the glow of my commute to a minimum.

By the time the elevator dinged at my destination on the seventh floor, I had managed to recapture the majority of the composure that had been leaking out of me over the last several blocks of my commute. The me who walked across the threshold into the waiting room for my appointment was a reasonable facsimile of the one who I hoped would show up here today.

It’s more crowded than expected and I lower myself into a chair next to a man, nearly as well-worn as his chipboard guitar case, who is sporting a balding scalp that still insisted on clinging to a rope of stone-gray ponytail. Ugh, musicians.

“Hi, I’m Jessica.” I turn to him and smile, “I’m a little late, they haven’t called me yet, have they?”

“No, you’re good. It’s not like they’re ever punctual themselves.” I must have disguised my initial distaste well because he seems like he’s just happy that someone has noticed that he isn’t part of the furniture.

I try to relax into the waiting room chair. It’s one of those ergonomic models that envisions that all people are the same shape and size, so rather than relax before my appointment, I find myself fighting off a chair back that seems intent on stabbing me in the spine.

“So, let me guess, a writer?” The musician is fighting a battle of his own, attempting to retain his brief promotion to fellow sentient being.

“Nope, I’m an artist.” I try not to be too offended by the pitying look that crosses his face as if anyone sitting in this room is in a better position than anyone else.

We are both rescued from this tortured interaction as a woman toting an iPad comes through an inner door and calls my name, “Jessica Wells?”

By way of answer, I pull myself out of the monstrosity masquerading as a chair and follow her into the adjoining room in the office. She motions me to a chair, a brother to those in the waiting room, and sits down on the opposite side of a utilitarian laminate-covered gray desk. I cringe inwardly as I notice that she is shackled to one of these chairs on a daily basis.

“Just a few questions before we start. Can you confirm that you are indeed Jessica Wells and that this is your first time contributing to Consort?” She stares at the tablet computer ready to tick the boxes that verify that I am who I say I am and that I am not here under false pretenses.

“Yes.”

“Have you, in the last five years, contributed to any entities who you know to be in direct competitor with Consort or any of its subsidiary corporations?”

“No, not to the best of my knowledge.”

“And you are aware that in agreeing to this commission, that Consort will retain all rights to the final product as well as a six-month right of first refusal for future work?”

“Yes.”

“Good, please sign here.” She turns the tablet to me where I awkwardly scrawl an approximation of my signature with my finger.

“Okay, follow me, and we’ll get you set up.”

She guides me into a long hallway of monochromatic dark gray, doors with brushed stainless steel knobs dotted the walls on either side at regular intervals. The low pile carpet of the hallway, likewise gray, swallows up the sound of our footsteps as we move to the far end of the corridor.

“You are going to be in room seventeen.” She opens the door and motions for me to go in first.

I take in the room, which is small and retains the same utilitarian lack of charm as the rest of the office but has the advantage of being stocked with brand-new art supplies. I take in the stack of heavily textured luxuriously thick paper, an assortment of graphite pencils, and best of all, a fresh set of pastels.

“Does everything seem to be to your liking?” She asked in such a way that in no way betrayed that this was a rhetorical question meant to elicit nothing but an answer in the affirmative.

“I think I have everything I need, thank you,” I said, fulfilling my end of the transaction.

“If you need anything else, just press the call button next to the door, and we’ll send someone down to help you. Take a few minutes to set up, your model should be here shortly.” She retreated to the hallway, closing the door behind her, leaving me alone to make this place my own.

It was curious to think that this was what passed for an art space. Nothing in the way of natural light, and aside from the tools of the trade, bright sticks of pigment almost glowing from their box, the room was a testament to sterility. It was something that had to be intentional because a space used by artists, especially a space designed to be used by artists, couldn’t help but pick up character, but there were no careless drips of paint on the floor or the table that held the supplies. The tilt-top desk that I would be working on showed none of the accidental cuts and scratches, smudges of graphite fingerprints, or the faded remnants of pigment that had been mostly but not quite cleaned away.

In a way, as much as it is shocking to the senses, it shouldn’t be surprising that this place wasn’t made with artists in mind. Artists are hardly more than an afterthought in the world at large, which is probably the biggest reason that I’m in this bleak lifeless room today. I should maybe just count my blessings that they haven’t moved to cubicles yet.

There was a thunk followed by two quick taps to announce the arrival of the model that I would be working with today. The awkwardness of the arrangement chose that moment to wash over me, culminating in a startled gasp that I did my best to transform into an invitation to enter. The part of my mind that I could trust in the moment attempted to sort the figure who emerged into the color palette that I would need to assemble for the project ahead of us.

He closed the door behind him and turned to find my hand offered in greeting, “Hi, I’m Jessica.”

“Marcus,” he said as he grasped my hand with a quick shake. If anything he seemed like he might be finding this more awkward than I was. His eyes darted around the cramped space searching for something to anchor himself to. “Do you have any idea how this is supposed to work?”

“Oh, so you’re a newbie to all of this, too. I think it’s pretty straightforward, you can sit over there on that stool, and I’ll adjust some lighting then we can get started.” I said, trying to exert some control over the situation. This might be far outside of the norm for me, and apparently him, but at its base, it is still just art, which I know.

I turned to see how Marcus was getting acquainted with the room only to have the question of his own timidity answered as I found him pulling his black t-shirt over his head exposing a lean and muscled midsection.

“Marcus, I don’t know what they told you, but it’s not that kind of modeling.”

“Oh, oh, I just assumed…” he stammered as he lowered his shirt. “I guess I was just thinking, you know back in art school, figure study classes, that kind of thing.” He was embarrassed but was playing it off better than I would have been able to manage if our roles had been reversed.

“You’re a fellow art school refugee, then?” I asked thinking that we may have found something to keep us afloat through this session. The prospect of spending the next couple hours sitting here quietly staring at each other hadn’t been a pleasant one.

“Kind of. I only took a semester or so of classes. Saw the way the wind was blowing, you know.”

“Yeah… that wind didn’t really start to kick up until my last semester, so I think I may have the distinction of being part of the most unemployable graduating class of what has stereotypically been an unemployable education.” It was the kind of gallows humor that is only really funny to someone else who has seen the rope swinging. He clearly got it though, there was a sadness in his dark eyes that communicated an anticipated future that had been pulled out from under him, even if he had at least been spared some of the heavier doses of student loan debt.

“That’s definitely been the reputation, my parents were always supportive, but you could tell it was that kind of support that was against their own better judgment. My Mom was just a little too happy when I decided to start nursing school.” I found myself adjusting my perception of the man in front of me. I wasn’t wrong about the sadness that I had seen a moment before but there was steel behind his eyes as well that I could recognize in the lack that I saw in myself.

“Sounds about right. Up until the very end, my parents were trying to convince me that art would be something that I could do on the side after I figured out something more practical to do with my life. To their credit, they weren’t too unbearable when it turned out that they were right, though I’m fairly certain that even their most pessimistic take on the field wasn’t anywhere near as bad as where we ended up.” I’ve always hated the word bitter, it’s a word that seems to contain within its own definition a judgment against the validity of your feelings. A bitterness really can be found underlying my own story, though, because there actually is a sagging beam that undergirds who I am now that constantly feels like it’s threatening to allow me to collapse in on myself.

“Okay, so yeah, you can sit there on the stool.” I decided to allow the work to fill up the silence that had settled between us. “It’s mostly just going to be a head and shoulders composition, but if you could lean forward and rest your chin on your hand. From what I understand they can never get enough hands.” As he settled into the pose, I adjusted the lighting to provide something a little more dynamic than the harsh office lighting that we had been dumped into.

“Like this?” He slumped forward into a heavy brooding pose of contemplation before he relaxed into a good-natured smile.

“Perfect, but just relax, give me something natural.” And he did, the goofiness fell off of him and I was left with the hurt yet resilient young man that I had perceived in the short interaction that we had muddled through so far.

I retreated to the tilt-top desk on the opposite side of our cramped little room and started to quickly lay down a preliminary sketch. Once I got the pose and the basic contours established I could let Marcus relax a little bit from the pose. I’m not sure exactly what they look for in their models, but he made an interesting subject, the tight curls of his hair contrasting with the sharper lines and angles of his face, and his long thin fingers offering something almost surreal to the composition.

I felt myself falling into a rhythm. This was a process that I worried might have become foreign to me, but my hand and eye were every bit as coordinated as the pair had been when putting pencil to paper was a daily exercise. The basic lines and shapes of the composition were coming together and I could feel an anticipation start to build as I was about to transition over to color.

“You can relax, I’m done with the initial sketch.” His relative amateur status as a model had been starting to show as I could start to see the stiffness setting into his shoulders, and the discomfort starting to creep into his face. “So, how did you get roped into modeling?”

“I still have six months or so until I’ll be out of school, and money has been pretty nonexistent in the meantime. My brain still goes back to art, even if it isn’t really my own art, and this didn’t seem like it would be too taxing with my school schedule. What do you do with your time when you’re not living out your dreams?” There’s a hint of a teasing smile in that question that I feel compelled to answer with an equally teasing glare of annoyance.

“It turns out that even though they hide us behind a labyrinth of text bots and menu options, they still haven’t found a computer program that people can satisfyingly berate. I work in customer service for a health insurance company. They’ve managed to automate or offshore most of the routine issues, so my days are filled with people whose medications we refuse to pay for even though we’ve been paying for them for the last decade, others who aren’t suffering quite enough for the operations they need until they have jumped through a few more hoops, and the people who realize that they pay several times their deductible each year in premiums for an insurance policy that acts like little more than a coupon booklet. Then we are required to ask if they would “pretty please” fill out a survey to tell us how unendingly satisfied they are with our service only to be called into quality assurance meetings every month because, of course, they are never remotely satisfied. Why would they be?” This rant served as background music for the laying down of the reds and oranges and purples that were ultimately going to shine through to the finished portrait. I continued blending with the tip of my finger and working the pigment into the heavy grain of the paper as the diatribe rolled over Marcus.

“Wow, that’s a lot… and how do you keep yourself sane dealing with that every day?” He’s trying to keep things light while affirming that my life does indeed seem like it sucks. A tricky balance.

“I do this, well not this, not the commission. I create, you may laugh but continuing to paint really does keep me from tipping over the edge.” It’s been a long time since I have done something even remotely like this and the intimacy of it is likely what is prompting all of the oversharing.

We fall back into another pause in our conversation as I have Marcus resume his pose so that I can fine-tune some of the deeper shadows. The medium lends itself to the soft-focused colors of a dream, but Marcus is demanding a work of contrasts and the rigid deep shadows are going to play an outsized role in a composition that will flow organically otherwise.

“So, just for yourself?” He breaks the silence, still wondering how I’ve held onto art despite all momentum moving in the opposite direction. He is maybe even searching to see if there might be a way for it to work for him again.

“No, I’ve never been able to create just for myself. People will say that the only audience that matters when it comes to art is ourselves, but that has never made any sense to me. Sure, a large part of art is obviously sel-expression, so I need to be satisfied with the final product, but art is meant to communicate and I’ve never been satisfied with talking to myself.” I start to layer in the rich multifaceted browns and the muted grays, the yellows where I will start to build the highlights.

“Then, where do you find your audience?” There really is a pining nature that has crept into the question, like I am about to give him the answer to keeping art alive in an artless world.

“You’ll laugh,” I say, sure that he will.

“I won’t.” Dead serious, equally confident that he won’t.

“Do you know that park near the corner of Fifth and Penn?” I ask, hoping he follows me.

“Yeah, it was never my park, but I grew up a few streets down.” The interest still in his eyes.

“Sidewalk chalk. There’s a path through the playground from the parking lot to the tennis courts, after work and in the morning most weekends I draw there. Sometimes it’s fantasy landscapes for the kids. Other times I might have a bored parent put up with me using them for inspiration. Every once in a while someone will toss me a couple dollars, I started bringing a hat. It lets me fool myself into thinking that I’m actually a professional.” I didn’t notice myself doing it, but I had paused my work on the portrait as I started sketching out instead the part of my life that I had managed to steal back from the world that had no real use for it. “It’s actually how I ended up here. One of the dads from the private school up the street was waiting for his daughter and had a connection where he was able to pull a string or two for me.”

A look of disappointment, or maybe confusion crosses his face, though he’s courteous enough to try to hide it once he realizes what he’s doing.

“Look, I get it. I’m pretty much a street… a sidewalk performer, but it’s what I have available to me.” I pointedly return to the painting, focusing on the sad persistent eyes that had captured me so soon after we first met. The dual nature of them calling out both to the damaged part of me that stubbornly refuses to heal because allowing the wound to close feels like a betrayal, and the hopeful aspect that says that there may be new dreams and fresh narratives on the other side of pain. The beauty is held in the tension between the two.

“The last thing I want to do is discourage you. I’m glad that you have found a way to continue creating even with the limited options left available to us. It just never stops being sad that we have allowed ourselves to be reduced to this.” That tension breaks for a moment and his eyes give in to despair, one that he has convinced himself that he hasn’t been running away from.

“What you are doing is still wortwhile. It’s not as though there’s any nobility lacking in training to help people who are sick and hurting.” I find myself in the unlikely role of trying to rekindle the hope in those captivating eyes. The work itself is coming to a head as the hidden depth starts to reveal itself in the highlights that I’m adding to his curves and angles. It’s work that comes together in a way that I hadn’t noticed it never quite does on a sidewalk.

“Marcus, I lose sight of it more often than not, but I really do believe that we can’t continue in the direction that we’re going. People are eventually going to realize that they are missing something vital from their lives, and the pendulum will start swinging back in our direction again. I want to be here for it when it does.” That seems to do the trick. While I’m not entirely sure that I have enough optimism in me to believe what I just told him, I have clearly just reminded him that he believes it.

“Thanks, Jessica, I needed that.” He moves to get up from his stool, and I nod for him to come over.

Marcus leans over my shoulder taking in the image of himself as I see him and as my hand has translated that vision to the page. I look up at him and see that he doesn’t entirely recognize himself. Not that I have missed the likeness, but that there is a part of himself that he has never really been able to see with his own eye, but has saturated the page in my representation of him. He sees who he can be to people and how it would have been a gift in the world that he imagined for himself, but will work every bit as well in the one that he will actually exist in.

It was then that inspiration hit me, “Just one more thing.”

Grabbing a small palette of colors, I start to rework the edge of the hand draped across his face, adding the slightest hint of a knuckle for a sixth finger to its contour.

“Wait, what is…” his confusion turned to delight as it hit him and he let out a small but satisfied laugh. “That’s perfect. Really though, this is beautiful work.”

And because it was work, just a side hustle for the both of us, we took that opportunity to part even though something significant had passed between us in the short time that we had spent together. Marcus departed and left me alone again in the room. I did a little light compulsive cleaning even though I knew that it was pointless. They would begin the process of erasing any evidence that I had been here before I even made it out of the building.

I was spraying some of the provided fixative to the painting, so that Marcus would stay where he was on the page, noting that this happened to be far from the well-ventilated area required for doing this when another knock came at the door.

It was a different employee, not the one who had shown me in, though the similarity was striking. As if the company was striving for a certain level of uniformity in their workforce, which of course, they probably were.

“If you are finished, we can head to my office and get everything finalized.” She said with a posture that subtly, but definitely, was encouraging me to leave.

As slowly as her patience would likely allow, I completed the final satisfying step in the process and pulled up the tape, leaving clean white borders along the edge, one of my favorite rituals of the finished work. I rose from my chair and stepped through the door, leaving behind that drab room that had for a short time been anything but.

I trailed the corporate doppelgänger down the hall to her office, passing once again the nondescript doors that assuredly led to identical nondescript rooms. When I entered her office, I handed over the painting, laying it on the desk in such a way that I could take it in one more time before I left.

“Was your experience satisfactory?” The employee, still conspicuously lacking anything like a name tag or identifying marker on her person or within the office, met my eyes after the most fleeting of glances at the work in front of her.

“Yeah, everything was great.” The stock answer that came so easily to the lips when you know that you are completing a question in a survey where you are being asked to lie.

“You provided a direct deposit account in your initial paperwork, so you should see your payment within the next three to seven days. If you don’t have any further questions or comments, you are free to go. We will be in contact if we require any future work from you.” She made eye contact just long enough to verify that I had processed my dismissal. She gave me a small strained smile that added any needed punctuation to the remark.

As I was gathering myself to leave, she snatched the painting from the desk and moved to the back of the office where a large flatbed scanner was housed. I watched as she placed it face down on the glass and closed the lid. She tapped a few buttons and the curiously loud whir of a high-resolution scan started.

I lingered a bit longer than was probably wise, but I found it impossible to uproot myself from the spot, almost as if I would be leaving my work abandoned if I were able to pull myself away from this desk. The whirring scanner came to a stop, and the employee gave a quick glance at a nearby monitor to verify that the scan had been successful.

She removed the painting from the scanner and with a fluid decisive motion she folded it in half, Marcus reduced to his curls and those eyes. She took two steps to her left and fed it into what I can only assume is a particularly heavy-duty paper shredder, the face that I had studied for the day disappearing into the machine, having been reduced to what must have been some impressively colorful strips of paper, left to mingle with brothers and sisters who would join him in never seeing the light of day.

I had definitely overstayed my welcome, so I made my way back out of the office and through the door at the end of the hallway, back through the waiting room that had significantly thinned since my brief stay in it. My eyes swept the room and found a face or two that still contained the life that I had found in Marcus, but mostly what I found were echoes of myself. People just trying to hold on, grasping onto whatever opportunities still existed to be this thing that they had so thoroughly grounded their identity in.

As I exited the building and passed a drone freshening up the graffiti in the adjoining alleyway, I thought of the park, the little handhold in the world that I had carved out for myself, and wondered how long I would be able to hold on. I thought of the Marcus in the painting, the one whose eyes brought me hope and I wondered how much of that was in him and how much of it I had pulled out of him because it was what I needed to see.

Maybe it didn’t matter.

Maybe one of those vital things that we have lost by letting go of the reins of art is the ability to give breath to things that we know to be true even if we can’t see them. I needed to see hope, and with pastel and page, I had crafted it into existence. Those hopeful eyes would carry me into the future, and they promise that I will find art there.