He made a gesture for me to follow, and he headed toward his studio. I found that I was full of nervous expectation. When I began to walk, my legs seemed not to recall how it was done. It seemed like a new skill, something Andy was going to have to teach me. I had the motivation of a runner in a dream, but the frustration of dream running, too, when I couldn’t make myself move through the dream stuff, the atmosphere of dreams that manacled me with rubbery air. There in the Glynns’ kitchen, in real life, the effect wasn’t as severe as it was in dreams, but even so I strained to make myself move and barely managed to shuffle a foot in the direction of the studio.
What’s the matter with me? I wondered, and went on wondering, more or less along the following lines. Whence comes this mixture of anxiety and eagerness? From the expectation that my lessons are about to begin, that Andy is going to tell me something, show me something, or require something of me that will, if not immediately, then in years to come, when I look back at this moment, prove to have been the thing, the single thing, that first lifted for me the veil that hid the secrets of his art, of art itself? The secrets were what I needed. As far as I was concerned, my career as a painter had already begun. After all, hadn’t I drawn a clam under the eye of the master himself?
“Peter!” he called. “Where are you?”
While I had been imagining my older self returning to this moment with recollected affection, Andy had made his way to the studio.
“Sorry, sorry—here I come,” I called, hastening to the master’s side.
“What happened?” he asked. “Cold feet?”
“I was just—um—”
“Daydreaming,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
Andy let some time pass without saying anything. He rummaged around in some boxes where he had an assortment of what looked like junk to me. After a long while, he found, apparently, what he wanted: a box of modeling clay, for children, in several colors. He began kneading some of it in his hands, warming it up, and he said, almost as if it had just occurred to him, “Abstraction.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I mean Andy.”
“Well, now, you see,” said Andy. His voice had changed. He sounded a great deal like my grandfathers when they were teaching me how to do something difficult—crab, say, or clean the points in a distributor. They would speak to me with exaggerated kindness and consideration, to acknowledge and encourage my enthusiasm, while making it clear to me that everything I was doing was wrong.
“See what?” I asked, wondering what it was that I was doing wrong.
“It’s not that simple.”
“Oh.” That made it a lot like crabbing and cleaning the points in a distributor.
“You see, you must come to abstraction from somewhere else.”
“Oh?”
“I think so. For example, you might start by trying to replicate exactly what you see. That’s one way you might start. Not the only way, you understand.”
“Okay.”
“So you start by trying to make on the canvas exactly what you see, and I mean what you see, not what everyone sees, or what you suppose everyone should see, or what someone would see if all the impediments to seeing were removed. Do you see?”
“Sure,” I said automatically, because it is what a student learns to say, but in a moment I thought that, maybe, I did see, even though I was confused. Earlier, I hadn’t even considered that learning to paint would involve so much emphasis on seeing, but I could see now that seeing was the threshold of the house of art. “I mean that I see a little,” I said with some pride.
“Ah! Very good! You’re an honest boy! You will need that! You will definitely need that!”
“Uh-huh. Okay.” For some reason, I felt uneasy when he praised me for my honesty.
“Aha!” he said. “I think you’re a little uneasy when I praise your honesty.”
I shrugged.
“Perhaps you’re not always so honest. Hm? Maybe sometimes you bend the truth a bit. Shape it to your needs.”
He picked up a lump of clay about the size of a pea and rolled it between his fingers.
“There are lots of reasons for doing that,” he said. “Bending the truth, I mean. For one thing, you might just want to make it look better.” He held the bit of clay up for me to see. He had smoothed it in his rolling, and flattened it slightly before he held it out, so that it looked like a smooth-skinned grape. I was dumbfounded.
“Not much,” he said, regarding his handiwork.
Then, with his other hand, he gave the lump half a twist. Now it inspired curiosity, it was partly hidden and partly revealed, and it had a sinuosity that was attractive in itself.
“Much more interesting,” he said. “Still a lump of clay, but more interesting. I could say that the truth is that it’s just a lump of clay. So, maybe you sometimes bend the truth to make it a little more interesting. Do you understand?”
“I think so,” I said.
“Any questions?” he asked.
“Well, yes,” I said.
“Fire away,” he said. “You won’t learn anything if you don’t ask questions.”
“Okay,” I said. “What happened after you and Mrs. Glynn got across the border?”
[to be continued]
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