The Colorman (4 page)

The other painter—the one from the front window—had the scratched gesso schtick that seemed to be getting a lot of attention. But then Rain figured most of the admirers were his own recruits. Sometimes, when witnessing the enthusiasm surrounding this sort of work, Rain felt as though she'd missed some entire micro-culture in the art world. Was it jealousy she was actually feeling?

Rain understood that the art “world” was like a network of veins. There were large and small ones crossing each other with absolutely nothing in common. They appeared to perform the same function. They pulsed at the same rate and were moved by some of the same influences. But their players coursed on independently, never mixing or even feeling anything about the other.

One of Rain's jobs at the gallery was dealing with the unsolicited submissions heaped upon them daily. Large manila envelopes addressed in all their variety, some even arriving via FedEx, to the Gwendolyn Brooker Gallery, West Broadway, New York, NY, 10012—printed labels, cartoon-like sharpie, scribbled messes, ripped and retaped.

Mostly artists sent slides in stiff plastic sheets, though increasingly it was CDs along with printed pages. Then, of course, there were the occasional actual paintings, something that always felt vaguely embarrassing to Rain. A desperate flinging. None of these had much to do with Gwendolyn Brooker Gallery, however. Rain couldn't understand how so many people can have missed day one of art-representation-search 101:
Know what the gallery represents.
Gwen Brooker showed a very particular vein of work: social realism. But, however narrow her area of interest, Gwen always managed to commit to the tradition of the summer show, which helped keep the mountains of slides coming in. That, and her irritating habit of sometimes grabbing a pile of submissions and writing careful y considered advice back to the artists, listing gal eries they should approach and other avenues they might pursue. Invaluable information for those who were able to recognize what they had been granted when facing, ultimately, her rejection.

One of the great art dealers who dominated the New York art world during the latter half of the century, Gwen had emerged from a line of powerful professional women in New York: Edith Halpert, Betty Parsons, Terry Dintenfass, Joan Washburn, Louise Ross. Some were mentors, some competitors. But characters, all of them. Confident, intellectual taste-makers who appeared to be passing into history. Even Gwen was beginning to talk more frequently of retiring to England with John, though both John and Rain laughed at her whenever she said that. The art was part of her, the artists like her children, even though most were her own age or older. She would never stop promoting them, never undersell them or resist buying up their works when they became available.

If the submissions included the required Self-Addressed-Stamped Envelope, Rain would open it and push the whole sad packet right back in, sliding a card in after it with Gwen's polite pass and heartfelt encouragement regarding their efforts. It fascinated Rain to see the range of work out there at which so many people were earnestly plugging away. Much of it was just plain bad. Some of it was alright, though her standards slid downwards as long days of this task dragged on. But, most sadly of all, sometimes she came across work that was actually very good, which was of course rejected, anyway.

The part of her that just loved the visual was made hopeful by finding interesting work out there. She delighted that a human mind and hand had conspired to create something refreshing and thoughtful. But there was that little part of her that was nervous when she came across work she liked. Such a tangle of feeling. Hopeful yet left behind. Hadn't she missed something? Wasn't she making that classic neophyte mistake of misinterpreting her own beginner discoveries as interesting for other people to see? The burst of pleasure she found in good paintings was always followed closely by those dark fears. Fears she willed against blooming into jealousy or paranoia.

Practicing serious effort in art meant excluding things. The moment brush or stick or finger or knife hits canvas or wood or masonite or stone or object, exclusions have been made. Materials, scale, subject, style—these are all mostly determined from the first mark. But these exclusions are not always comfortable. It is the decision made, the selective leavings behind—that is the dirty work which we admire in artists.

“Where are you, Rain?” Karl smiled uncharacteristically.

“Sorry,” Rain said, coming back.

“You know Penelope is here jurying at Pollack Krasner.”

“Is that right?” Rain asked. “How do you like it?”

“Quite disappointing, I should say,” she replied archly.

Karl interrupted, “Rain knows all about that, don't you Rain? She handles the slush pile around here.”

“Oh, my God,” Penelope effused. “It's simply amazing to me the shit we have to slog through in there. It's like none of them has any idea what's going on in the art world. Honestly, I have no idea how these people can believe that their chalky-looking portraits of nudes with their Cezanne brushstrokes and their Matisse colors are just going to jolt us out of our seats,” she laughed. “It
is
despicable. Or the glowing candy-land treacle storybook scenes… I'm not joking.” Her words piled out one on top of the other.

Rain waited until Penelope had concluded her offering. Rain was unsurprised that none of them had said a word about her work. It just wasn't done. The most you might get was hearty congratulations, never comments about the work to your face.

“Yeah,” Rain said non-committally. “I don't know; I guess I find it heartening.”

“Heartening?” Penelope's accent was elevating as she got more animated. “It's absolutely depressing!” she moaned, allowing herself a good look up and down at Rain in her thrift store dress. “Rather pathetic, I should think.”

Rain smiled at her. “I guess I see it as a good thing—people making art at all. I don't think about it from a business point of view, I guess. Gwen just isn't going to take on anything new, so it's not even a matter of that. I just see it as something people are doing and getting pleasure from.”

“Yes, well…they might keep it to themselves,” Penelope quipped cheekily.

“We better get going,” Peter said. First thing out of his mouth. American, evidently.

“It was a pleasure,” Penelope said to Rain, as though she'd been thanked. Rain was left a little rattled.

Rain watched her kiss Karl on both cheeks. She was irritated by Penelope, but resisted the burden that disliking a person requires. How this person so homely of face could be so supremely confident and superior? But Rain refused to engage in those sorts of judgments. She didn't believe in them and so tried to nip them off before they could bloom into a whole thought about this woman's skeletal thinness and wide, high breasts and perfect slope of hip all shown off in draped linen and ruched silk. Something in her ashen, unprimped face was belligerent. Something in her embrace and exploitation of popular culture, her exploitation of the utterly unexploitable. Nope. I can't go there, she demanded of herself.

Rain rejoined Karl in the increasing crowd.

“I'm going to head out for drinks with them. You want to join us later?”

“Uh, Gwen's?” Rain asked.

“Oh, God, yeah,” Karl said. “Totally forgot. I'll…uh…”

“Go ahead. Just meet us there around nine, okay?”

“Hey,” Karl said. “Did I say congratulations?”

Rain gave him a single peck on one cheek.

Purple haze all in my brain
Lately things just don't seem the same
Actin' funny, but I don't know why
'Scuse me while I kiss the sky.

—J
IMI
H
ENDRIX

P
urple is richness beyond measure, the sensuousness of wine-stained lovers' lips and the quenching sweetness of grape and berry. Purple is also injury and death: the florid purple of a bruise, the darkening face of a choking victim, the opalescence of rotting flesh.

The term “purple prose” was coined by Horace, referencing the pretension of sewing bits of purple into garments to feign wealth. It is fussy, overwrought, and nobody's falling for it, anyway. Purple dyes were more precious than gold at that time, so faking it in this way was the ancient equivalent of dripping in cubic zirconia and gold plate. There's a double layer of humiliation. That it's fake, and that you're working so hard to appear to be something that is false to begin with.

Purple is royalty, a connotation that has everything to do with the extreme value of the pigments available for cloth-dying in antiquity. Tyrian purple was the original purple dye, created from tiny, snail-like mollusks. Only the super-rich royalty could afford such expensive stuff. It was the true holy grail the pigment-making alchemists worked toward—the gold created from the “philosopher's stone.”

Though found in nature both in flora and precious stones, purple was the most difficult to reproduce as a colorant. Thus purple as a moniker persists to this day in its air of rarity and oddness, per purple cow.

Some theories hold that the earth was once more purple than green, that a purple-appearing, light-sensitive molecule called retinal was more commonly found than our familiar green chlorophyll. Could this explain the “wine dark seas” of the Odyssey and the many other confusing color terms in ancient languages? Perhaps this explains the more intricate delineation of indigo and violet after blue in our essential, and older, breakdown of primary colors in Newton's R.o.y. G. B.i.v. spectrum as opposed to the more current-day color wheel's triad (red yellow blue) and hexagonal wheel (adding the complements orange, green and purple), with it's one simple “purple” now comprising the stretch at that end of visible energy.

The Greeks described colors ranging from dark to light, rather than hue to hue along the rainbow. Was this simply a matter of descriptive terms, of translation? Like the proverbial dozens of words the Inuits use for snow compared to our own single word? Perhaps we are color Inuits, lovingly distinguishing shades where ancient peoples just didn't see meaningful distinctions. Could we have evolved out of color blindness over the millennia? Or did our color sensitivity just shift toward another end of the spectrum?

Left over from the days when the river and then the train were the only reasonable modes of industrial transport in the Hudson Valley, the riverfront still sported oil yards, abandoned factories, chain-link fences and unusable super-fund sites al along its banks. Even as economies picked up, many of these sites were slow to be transformed into waterfront beauties, though a few spots are notable exceptions: the old Nabisco factory in Beacon, now home to the fabulously minimal and grand scale Dia:Beacon; a number of green spa and condo sites in development and the ever-increasing number of “open space” projects reclaiming river properties as their prior stewards die off and their heirs can't afford to maintain them.

This type of economic fluke had allowed James Morrow, grandson of founder James Birch Morrow, who had brought the works over from England in the 1920s, to inherit and resuscitate the business his father had failed at so desperately. Morrow still owned a little property around the small factory building, but in the thick woods immediately surrounding Highland Morrow were properties his grandfather had collected, and his spendthrift father had sold off, including an insane asylum (erstwhile rehab clinic now uninhabited), a defunct monastery and no fewer than five churches. Watching his father fall dangerously close to losing the business, James finally quit college in England, married and brought his young, beautiful, Norwegian wife with him. In 1964, at the tender age of twenty-two, James took the helm of the foundering little company and all its mysterious recipes and equipment. The land was nearly all sold off by then, only the small caretaker's house remaining, and the new country estates were beginning to pop up in the woods around them. James, his wife and father installed themselves in the little house where James' father set about drinking himself to death with a good deal of efficiency.

James was young enough to have been a part of the hippie generation, but his father's destruction of everything his beloved grandfather had built made him uncharacteristically practical and unsentimental. Rather than wallowing in the utopian ideals of a better world, James' energies were honed and focused on keeping alive a centuries-old craft and business. Even through the sorrows and tragedies that dogged his young life, somehow James managed to make the business a success.

Gwen and Rain stood in the kitchen of Gwen's loft. Even though Rain's father lived there with Gwen, Rain stil thought of the place as Gwen's. She had owned this cavernous and exquisitely decorated loft since the earliest days of Soho's gentrification in the early 1970s. Gwen and John had dated for several years before marrying ten years ago, at which point Rain was already on her own.

Gwen's loft blended outsider art objects with sleek, modernist furniture and, of course, her own artists' works were peppered throughout. The narrow hallway into the kitchen was crowded with portraits of Gwen by most of them. Gwen sitting demurely in Henry Chilton's distinctive elongated style. Gwen laughing in Rip Goulding's dark, splattery markings. Gwen's hands by Jacob Houseman, her lover for many years. And Gwen dancing with John by Stephan Carr, her youngest artist who was most like a son to her. In it, Gwen looks directly at the viewer, her chin raised proudly and her arm crossing possessively in front of John. He holds her passively, his arms wide to her and the viewer. His demure smile and his downward gaze give his expression a kind of benign satisfaction. Rain always loved this portrait of her father and Gwen. It spoke so lyrically and gracefully of the happy and evenhanded aspects of their relationship.

Karl sauntered into the kitchen having let himself in. “How are the
gallerists
?” Karl said. He took Rain's head and gave it a possessive peck. Karl seemed to think a slight sarcasm was the same thing as easy-going flirtatiousness.