Ethan Chatagnier - Warnings from the Future

I stood back and observed it with Deckinger. Lights blinked on and off inside the buildings. The currents and eddies of the Charles moved and swirled in the magic of the candlelight. It was hard to believe this real bend in the Charles was just outside, less than a mile away, when it seemed to be living for the moment in this parlor. I looked over to Deckinger, but he didn’t take his eyes off what I’d created.

He went to his kitchen and started polishing a lowball glass, which I think he did for show. He poured himself a dram of something darker than the cognac. There was no glass for me this time. “Well,” he said. Then again, “Well. Isn’t that fucking something?” He got out his wallet again and counted out more cash, still watching the river dance. He’d tipped me five hundred dollars. Yet I found my own eyes now settled on his glass of that mystery spirit, thinking I might trade the whole tip for my own glass of it and for the name on the label.

In November I conferred with Professor Wei, and I found myself rushing through an explanation of my work—the painting I’d brought and the sketches I’d done for a few more—in order to tell him about Deckinger, his Durant, and my pumpkin-carving adventures. I lowballed the amount I made by several thousand—studio art professors brought in less than the cost of living in the Boston metro—and still I raised his eyebrows. I told him I had stumbled into a Beacon Hill client base, and he said, very pointedly, “A-ha.”

My ideas for the Christmas season were still in development: intricate wire wreaths speckled with mirrors and candles; nativity or festivity mosaics; huge panels of holiday scenes constructed out of Christmas lights, like a Lite-Brite on crack, I said.

Professor Wei had an impressive slouch. His shoulder blades and sacrum were the only points of contact with his chair, his feet extended far in front of him, giving the impression that his body was the hypotenuse of a right triangle. It was more work, I was certain, than sitting straight up would have been. He did it when he was concentrating. He was also steepling his fingers, which signaled concentration squared.

“Hand me your sketchbook,” he said. He flipped through it several times, taking so long on each page that I was sure he was preparing a scorching critique. The ambitious students flocked to his classes and the sensitive ones flocked away, for he was not one to mince words. In turn I began composing a mental apologia, though I never planned on using it, because while the professor never raised his voice, he never lost an argument either. When he finished he closed the book gently and slid it across the desk to me. He tapped the front and asked, “Why would you work on anything but this?”

Those were just ideas, I told him, ideas too derivative of Durant to be worth anything on their own. The carving had netted me my living expenses for most of a year, and hadn’t even monopolized my time—half of this painting had been done during my busiest days of carving. If I could come up with another moneymaker for the holiday season, I could set myself up for the next two years and have half my student loans paid off by the time I graduated. Remembering the Jewish neighborhood down the street, I started extemporizing: artisan menorahs, micropainted dreidels. Only later did I realize how stupid this all sounded.

“But what you are talking about is craft, even if you are very good with these pumpkins. Tell me, how much would you pay for one of those?” He laughed. “I wouldn’t buy one, no offense. I don’t think you would, either. Not because they’re not good for what they are, but because of what they are. Now tell me, how much would you pay for this Durant you saw?”

“I’m not talking about giving up painting.”

“Did Evan Durant spend his time carving jack-o’-lanterns? A craftsman can schedule his time. An artist has to dive in. These are the best things I’ve seen in my classes in a long time.”

At that hint of praise my argumentative tack dropped, and I lapsed into full-on therapy mode. I said maybe that was true, but what about the other classes at the school? What about all the classes at the handful of other art schools in Boston, or all the classes at the hundreds of schools across the nation? What about New York? What about people like Durant, who dropped out as undergraduates and painted under the radar for years? What about time , about multiplying the competition by each entering class of the future, filled with new prospects? Was it so bad to hedge my bets a little when some college dropout in a basement in Peoria was potentially doing the same thing I was doing but better?

I caught my breath and began to apologize. Professor Wei’s slouch had intensified. He was staring up at the ceiling, and he looked like a plank that had been tipped over onto the office chair. I wasn’t sure his butt was even in contact with the seat cushion. He asked to see my notebook again, and I waited while he looked through it in much the same fashion as before.

“You’re right about the odds. But you’ll have your whole life to sell pumpkins to rich gentiles and menorahs to rich Jews if this doesn’t pan out. As a professor my job is to spot talent and nurture potential, not to make any promises, but I will make you one promise regarding your potential: a friend of mine runs a gallery out in Brighton. If the rest of your series comes out as well as that one, I’ll help you get your paintings in it.”

So I forwent any holiday-themed business ventures and instead dove in, as Professor Wei had suggested, to the work. I had to start transporting the finished works to a storage closet at the school because there wasn’t space in the unsteamed corner of my studio and I was worried about the canvases warping or taking on a beefy smell. A few times I asked the professor to take a look at them, but he refused, saying this was a personal project and I shouldn’t let anyone else in just yet. He was right again. I had something I wanted to say to Durant: that I was not just one face in a crowd, that some people deserved to be the focus of their own painting. It was a personal project, and thus it was different than anything else I had created. Before I had always gauged my work by how closely it approximated the work of established masters and contemporary upstarts, but an internal metric had sprung out nowhere for these paintings, offering me intense joy when I felt I was hitting that shadowy goal and despair when I wasn’t. When I couldn’t get a detail right, I would feel the whole series was doomed.

I worked away through the coldest months. Snow was on the sidewalks and piled in the gutters outside, and little breezes blew the frigid air in through the little gap I left open at the window. I learned to calibrate it, two inches on cold days, one inch during the freezes, closed at 9 p.m., an hour before the kitchen below shut down. I imagined being interviewed one day in Aesthetica or Juxtapoz and telling stories of my early days painting above a Vietnamese restaurant, drinking from a bottle of cognac I could not afford.

After the fragmented face I’d started in October, I worked on a crowd much like the ones in Durant’s paintings, except every face in the crowd was my own, every expression a variety of expression I actually made. In another the faces of everyone in a crowd were blurred beyond recognition, except for one face (not mine—too obvious, of course) in high focus. I replicated the famous photo of Muhammad Ali towering over a downed Sonny Liston, but each of those faces in the background, those heads sticking up behind the ring, was Ali’s as well, sharing his cock-headed moment of triumph, his dare to Liston to get up again. I became hyperaware of crowds when I was in public, aware of my place in them, whether I was dead center or on the fringes, where I would be if the crowd were composed and framed. I even sought some out: the game-day commuters at Kenmore, the new-exhibit-goers at the Museum of Fine Arts.