When You Are Engulfed in Flames (10 page)

Adult Figures Charging Toward a Concrete Toadstool

Before it was moved out near the fairground, the North Carolina Museum of Art was located in downtown Raleigh, and often, when we were young, my sister Gretchen and I would cut out of church and spend an hour looking at the paintings. The collection was not magnificent, but it was enough to give you a general overview, and to remind you that you pretty much sucked. Both Gretchen and I thought of ourselves as artists. She the kind that could actually draw and paint, and me the kind that pretended I could actually draw and paint. When my sister looked at a picture, she would stand at a distance, and then slowly, almost imperceptibly, drift forward, until her nose was right up against the canvas. She examined all of the painting, and then parts of it, her fingers dabbing in sympathy as she studied the brushstrokes.

“What are you thinking about?” I once asked.

And she said, “Oh, you know, the composition, the surfaces, the way things look realistic when you’re far away but weird when you’re up close.”

“Me too,” I said, but what I was really thinking was how grand it would be to own a legitimate piece of art and display it in my bedroom. Even with my babysitting income, paintings were out of the question, so instead I invested in postcards, which could be bought for a quarter in the museum shop and matted with shirt cardboard. This made them look more presentable.

I was looking for framing ideas one afternoon when I wandered into a little art gallery called the Little Art Gallery. It was a relatively new place, located in the North Hills Mall and owned by a woman named Ruth, who was about my mom’s age, and introduced me to the word “fabulous,” as in: “If you’re interested, I’ve got a fabulous new Matisse that just came in yesterday.”

This was a poster rather than a painting, but still I regarded it the way I thought a connoisseur might, removing my glasses and sucking on the stem as I tilted my head. “I’m just not sure how it will fit in with the rest of my collection,” I said, meaning my Gustav Klimt calendar and the cover of the King Crimson LP tacked above my dresser.

Ruth treated me as an adult, which must have been a task, given the way I carried on. “I don’t know if you realize it,” I once told her, “but it seems that Picasso is actually Spanish.”

“Is he?” she said.

“I had a few of his postcards on my French wall, the one where my desk is, but now I’ve moved them next to my bed, beside the Miró.”

She closed her eyes, pretending to imagine this new configuration. “Good move,” she said.

The Little Art Gallery was not far from my junior high, and I used to stop by after class and hang out. Hours later I’d return home, and when my mother asked where I had been, I’d say, “Oh, at my dealer’s.”

In 1970, the only artwork in my parents’ house was a family tree and an unframed charcoal portrait of my brother, my four sisters, and me done by a guy at a street fair. Both hung in the dining room, and I thought they were pretty good until I started spending time with Ruth and decided that they weren’t challenging enough.

“What more do you want from a group picture of six spoiled children?” my mother asked, and rather than trying to explain I took her to see Ruth. I knew that the two of them would get along. I just didn’t think they would get along so well. At first the topic of conversation was me — Ruth doing the cheerleading and Mom just sort of agreeing. “Oh, yes,” she said. “His bedroom is lovely. Everything in its place.”

Then my mother started hanging out at the gallery as well, and began buying things. Her first purchase was an elongated statue of a man made from what looked like twisted paper but was actually metal pressed into thin sheets. He stood maybe two feet tall and held three rusted wires, each attached to a blown-glass balloon that floated above his head.
Mr. Balloon Man,
she called it.

“I’m just not certain he needs that top hat,” I told her.

And my mother said, “Oh, really?” in a way that meant: If I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it.

It bothered me that she’d bought something without seeking my advice, and so I continued to offer my thoughtful criticism, hoping it might teach her a lesson.

Her next piece was a grandfather clock with a body made of walnut and a human face pounded from what appeared to be a Chinese gong. The face wasn’t realistic but what my mother called “semiabstract,” a word she had picked up from Ruth. A word that was supposed to be mine. I didn’t know exactly how much the clock had cost, but I knew it was expensive. She called it
Mr. Creech,
in honor of the artist, and when I tried to explain that art was not a pet you gave a little name to, she told me she could call it whatever the hell she wanted to.

“Should I put
Mr. Creech
next to
Mr. Balloon Man,
or does that make the dining room too busy?”

“Don’t ask me,” I told her. “You’re the expert.”

Then my father was introduced to Ruth, and he became an expert as well. Art brought my parents together in a way that nothing else had, and because their interest was new they were able to share it without being competitive. Suddenly they were a team, the Walter and Louise Arensberg of Raleigh, North Carolina.

“Your mother’s got a real eye,” my father boasted — this in regard to
Cracked Man,
a semiabstract face made by the same potter who had crafted our new coffee table. Dad wasn’t in the habit of throwing money around, but this, he explained, was an investment, something that, like stocks and bonds, would steadily appreciate in value, ultimately going “right through the roof.”

“And in the meantime, we all get to enjoy it,” my mother said. “All of us except Mr. Crabby,” by which she meant me.

The allure of art had always been that my parents knew nothing about it. It had been a private interest, something between me and Gretchen. Now, though, everyone was in on it. Even my Greek grandmother had an opinion, that being that unless Jesus was in the picture it wasn’t worth looking at.
Yiayia
was not discriminating — a Giotto or a Rouault, it made no difference so long as the subject was either nailed to a cross or raising his arms before a multitude. She liked her art to tell a story, and, though that particular story didn’t interest me, I liked the same thing. It’s why I preferred the museum’s
Market Scene on a Quay
to its Kenneth Noland. When it came to
making
art, however, I tended toward the Noland, as measuring out triangles was a lot easier than painting a realistic-looking haddock.

Before my parents started hanging out at the gallery, they thought I was a trailblazer. Now they saw me for what I was: not just a copycat, but a lazy one. Looking at my square of green imposed atop a pumpkin-colored background, my father stepped back, saying, “That’s just like what’s-his-name, that guy who lives on the Outer Banks.”

“Actually, it’s more like Ellsworth Kelly,” I said.

“Well, he must have gotten his ideas from the guy on the Outer Banks.”

At the age of fifteen, I was maybe not the expert I made myself out to be, but I did own a copy of
The History of Art
and knew that eastern North Carolina was no hotbed of artistic expression. I was also fairly certain that no serious painter would devote half the canvas to his signature, or stick an exclamation point at the end of his name.

“That shows what
you
know,” my mother said. “Art isn’t about following the rules. It’s about breaking them. Right, Lou?”

And my father said, “You got it.”

The next thing they bought was a portrait done by a man I’ll call Bradlington.

“He’s an alcoholic,” my mother announced, this as if his drinking somehow made him more authentic.

With the exception of my grandmother, everyone liked the Bradlington, especially me. It brought to mind a few of the Goyas I’d seen in my art history book — the paintings he did toward the end, when the faces were just sort of slashed on. “It’s very moody,” I pronounced. “Very . . . invoc-ative.”

A few months later, they bought another Bradlington, a portrait of a boy lying on his back in a ditch. “He’s stargazing,” my mother said, but to me the eyes seemed blank, like a dead person’s. I thought my parents were on a roll, and was disappointed when, instead of buying a third Bradlington, they came home with an Edna Hibel. This was a lithograph rather than a painting, and it pictured a young woman collecting flowers in a basket. The yellow of the blossoms matched the new wallpaper in the breakfast nook, and so it was hung above the table. The idea of matching artwork to decor was, to me, an abomination, but anything that resulted in new stuff was just fine by my mother. She bought a sofa the salesman referred to as “the Navajo,” and then she bought a piece of pottery that complemented the pattern of the upholstery. It was a vase that stood four feet high and was used to hold the dried sea oats that matched the frame of an adjacent landscape.

My mother’s sister, Joyce, saw a photo of our new living room and explained that the American Indians were a lot more than sofa cushions. “Do you have any idea how those people live?” she asked. Joyce did charity work with the tribes in New Mexico, and, through her, my mother learned about desperate poverty and kachina dolls.

My father preferred the tribes of the Pacific Northwest, and began collecting masks, which smirked and glowered from the wall above the staircase. I’d hoped that the Indian stuff might lead my parents to weed out some of their earlier choices, but no such luck. “I can’t get rid of
Mr. Creech,
” my mother said. “He hasn’t appreciated yet.”

I was in my second year of college by then and was just starting to realize that the names my parents so casually tossed around were not nationally known and never would be. Mention Bradlington to your Kent State art history teacher, and she’d take the pencil out of her mouth and say, “Who?”

“He’s an alcoholic? Lives in North Carolina?”

“I’m sorry, but I’ve never heard of him.”

As for the others, the Edna Hibels and Stephen Whites, they were the sort whose work was advertised in
ARTnews
rather than
Artforum,
their paintings and lithographs “proudly shown” alongside wind chimes at places with names like the Screeching Gull, or Desert Sunsets, galleries almost always located in a vacation spot. I tried pointing this out to my parents, but they wouldn’t listen. Maybe
today
my art history teacher drew a blank on Bradlington, but after his liver gave out she’d sure as hell know who he was. “That’s the way it works sometimes,” my father said. “The artist is only appreciated after he’s dead. Look at Van Gogh!”

“So will
every
artist be appreciated after his death?” I asked. “If I’m hit by a bus tomorrow afternoon, will the painting I did last week be worth a fortune?”

“In a word, no,” my father said. “I mean, it’s not enough to just be dead. You’ve got to have some talent. Bradlington’s got it out the ass, and so does Hibel. The gal who made the coffee table is going to last for an eternity, but as for you, I wouldn’t bank on it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

My father settled down on the Navajo. “It means that your artwork doesn’t look like art.”

“And you’re the expert on that?”

“I’d say so, yes.”

“Well, you can just go to hell,” I told him.

I’d never have admitted it, but I knew exactly what my father was talking about. At its best, my art looked like homework. This was to be expected with painting and drawing — things requiring actual skill — but even my later conceptual pieces were unconvincing. The airmail envelope full of toenail clippings, the model of the Lincoln Memorial made of fudge — in someone else’s hands, such objects might provoke discussion, but in my own they seemed only desperate and pretentious. Not just homework but bad homework.

I quit making homework when I turned thirty, and I started collecting paintings some ten years later, shortly after moving to Europe. A few of my canvases are French or English, portraits mainly, dating from the 1800s, but the ones I most care about are Dutch, and were done in the seventeenth century.
Monkey Eating Peaches, Man Fleeing a Burning Village, Figures Tormented by Devils in Hell
— how can you go wrong with such straightforward titles? The artists are minor — sons, most often, of infinitely more talented fathers — but if I say their names with a certain authority I can almost always provoke a response. (“Did you say Van der Pol? Oh, right, I think I saw something of his at the Louvre.”)

People hush up when they stand before my paintings. They clasp their hands behind their backs and lean forward, wondering, most likely, how much I paid. I want to tell them that each cost less than the average person spends on car insurance, that and general upkeep — oil changes and break pads and such. I, myself, don’t have a car, so why not take that money and put it toward something I like? Then, too, the paintings will appreciate, maybe not a lot, but given time I can surely get my money back, so in a way I’m just guarding them. Explaining, though, would ruin the illusion that I am wealthy and tasteful. A connoisseur. A collector.

The sham falls apart only when I’m visited by a real collector, or, even worse, by my father, who came in the winter of 2006 and spent a week questioning my judgment. One of my paintings shows a group of cats playing musical instruments. It sounds hokey on paper — cute, even — but in real life it’s pleasantly revolting, the musicians looking more like monsters than anything you’d keep as a pet. I have it in my living room, and, after asking the price, my father shook his head the way you might when witnessing an accident. “Boy,” he said. “They sure saw
you
coming.”

Whether I’m buying a painting or a bedspread, his premise is always the same — namely, that I am retarded, and people take advantage of me.

“Why would something that’s survived three hundred years
not
cost that much?” I asked, but he’d moved to another evident eyesore, this one Dutch, showing a man undergoing a painful and primitive foot surgery. “I wouldn’t spend two minutes looking at this one,” he told me.