THE ARTIST

All his life, Adrian Fatslap had been waiting for his art to be recognized. 

He had been waiting since age nineteen, when he abandoned the accounting program his father had chosen for him and enrolled instead at the School of Fine Arts, announcing to his horrified parents that he intended to devote his life to painting. His parents asked how he would make a living.

Adrian had been confident in his decision and his likelihood of success.

He had remained certain through his twenties, when certainty was easy. He painted in a succession of cheap apartments, worked evenings in restaurants, read biographies of artists who had starved in obscurity, and regarded every rejection as evidence that he was keeping distinguished company. Van Gogh had sold almost nothing. Modigliani had died poor. Vermeer died in obscurity and poverty, leaving his family in debt. 

Recognition, Adrian assured himself, was often late in arriving.

By thirty-five, the comparison had begun to trouble him.

By forty-five, he no longer had that youthful confidence and exuberance. 

Now, at fifty-six, Adrian occupied a studio above a plumbing-supply warehouse in a part of the city where no one went looking for art. The rent was low because the building smelled of rubber tubing and because the freight elevator had not worked for decades. The room was large, however, with high windows and excellent northern light, and Adrian had filled it with the accumulated evidence of a life spent trying very hard to do something he could not quite do.

There were landscapes stacked against the walls, portraits behind the landscapes, still lifes behind the portraits. There were experiments with abstraction, expressionism, cubism, minimalism and several movements Adrian had invented himself during particularly hopeful periods, such as his study of cylinders. He had painted women, horses, abandoned factories, bowls of pears, storm clouds, city streets in rain and, during an unfortunate six months in his thirties, enormous close-ups of vegetables.

None of it was terrible. And that was perhaps the problem. His paintings were competent enough to avoid abject ridicule and ordinary enough to avoid attention. Gallery owners examined them with the solemn expression of physicians delivering benign but disappointing test results.

“Your work is promising.” Adrian had learned to dread those words.

"Your use of color is interesting.” That was worse.

"We'll hold on to your contact information.” That meant goodbye.

In thirty-seven years, Adrian had sold eleven paintings. Three had been bought by relatives, including his mother. One had been purchased by a dentist who later admitted that he had mistaken Adrian for another artist. One piece sold at a flea market and found its resting place in a men’s room. His largest legitimate sale, a painting of fishing boats at dusk, had brought three hundred dollars, and Adrian had secretly visited the restaurant where it hung for years afterward, ordering coffee he could barely afford so that he could sit beneath it.

He supported himself by teaching adult art classes three evenings a week.

"Don't paint what you think a tree looks like," he told his students. "Paint what you see.” They wrote this down.

Sometimes Adrian wondered whether he had spent his entire life teaching other people things he himself had never understood and could not do.

On a rainy Thursday in November, he received what he privately decided would be his final rejection.

The letter came from the Ostrow Gallery, a small but respected outlet that specialized in representing older artists whose work had been overlooked. Adrian had allowed himself to hope. He had submitted twelve paintings, carefully photographed, along with a statement he had rewritten twenty-three times.

The email was courteous. He read it twice. Then he closed his laptop. For several minutes he sat without moving. There was something different about rejection at fifty-six. At twenty-six, rejection meant not yet. At fifty-six, it had begun to mean most likely never.

He looked around the studio. Hundreds of canvases looked back.

He stood and walked to the large blank canvas mounted against the far wall. It was nearly six feet high, the largest he had ever bought, purchased months earlier for a painting he had imagined but never begun. He had thought it would become his ultimate masterpiece. 

Now, he had no idea what to put on it. Adrian picked up a brush. He put it down. He picked up another.

For nearly an hour he mixed colors on his palette, scraping them away, mixing them again. Ochre. Mauve. Alizarin crimson. Titanium white. Ultramarine. Burnt umber. Olive green.

Nothing came. His frustration finally reached a boiling point. It was not the anger of youth. He did not throw brushes or curse the gallery owners who had failed to recognize him. It was something quieter and considerably worse: the anger of a man beginning to realize that the world had assessed him correctly.

He looked at the blank canvas.

"What do you want from me?"

It was an absurd question, and he knew it.

As the afternoon light waned and twilight set in, Adrian put down his palette on a flimsy plastic table that also held numerous cans of paints, oils and thinner. He sat there for some time, quietly ruminating, as the gloaming of the evening gradually enveloped him. 

And he thought, "I just don't have time for this."

He hadn’t eaten since the morning, and decided to see what was in the fridge.

That was when he stepped on the corn broom.

He had left it lying behind him after sweeping the studio earlier that afternoon. His heel came down squarely on the bristle head.

The broom had been lying across a small block of wood that acted as a fulcrum. The handle shot upward with force, slamming into the underside of the plastic table beside him. The table jumped. Adrian’s palette, loaded with half-mixed oils, flipped into the air, along with three open cans of paint.

In the darkness, Adrian could barely discern what was happening, and looked up at exactly the wrong moment.

The palette struck him directly in the face, the open cans of paint quickly following, dumping a colorful mixture directly over his head.

He shouted and staggered backward, blinded beneath a wet explosion of red, blue, yellow, black and white. He wiped instinctively at his eyes, spreading the paint across his forehead and cheeks.

His foot caught the leg of a stool, causing him to lose his balance, but not quite enough to fall. He staggered backward, desperately trying to regain his footing. 

The enormous blank canvas stopped him.

For an instant, his entire paint-covered face struck the stretched linen, which was secured firmly to a large easel. His hands slapped against it on either side of his head as he struggled for balance. The easel tilted away from the wall as Adrian lurched forward, his face sliding down the canvas from top to bottom. 

After slamming into the ground, he lay there stunned and swearing. His first thought was his eyes, which were completely covered in paint.

His second was the carpet.

His third, when he could finally see again, was that he had ruined a very expensive canvas.

He washed his face at the utility sink for nearly twenty minutes. When he returned, dripping and exhausted, he began gathering the wreckage.

Then he noticed the canvas.

He stopped.

Something was looking at him. It was not exactly a face, but something very interesting. 

The collision had transferred the paint in layers and fragments. One cheek had left a broad crimson curve crossed by blue. The ridge of his nose had dragged downward through white and black, creating a sharp central division. His closed eyelids had produced two dark horizontal marks, unequal and strangely mournful. His forehead had deposited yellow and ochre in a broken halo above them. Where he had twisted away, the side of the face dissolved into streaks.

The hands had left partial impressions, also, ghostly forms on either side, as though someone trapped inside the painting were intensely pressing outward, trying to escape.

Adrian stared. He lifted the canvas. He turned it toward the light.

As he manipulated the canvas, something happened. The image changed. From one angle, it was grotesque. From another, it seemed almost serene. The features appeared to emerge from disorder and then disappear into it. One half suggested terror, the other resignation. The accidental streak beneath the left eye looked unmistakably like a tear.

Adrian moved closer. He had spent thirty-seven years trying to make paint obey him. For the first time, it had refused. And the result was beautiful.

“No!" he whispered.

He hated it immediately. Not because it was ugly. Because it was better than anything he had ever painted.

He left it on the floor overnight. The next morning, he nearly painted over it. Instead, he propped it up against a wall.

For three days, he studied it. He considered adding something to the upper corner, then realized that anything he deliberately added would diminish it. He thought of softening the black along the jaw. He held the brush near the canvas for several seconds before lowering it.

He did not touch a thing.

A week later, his friend Mara came to the studio. She taught sculpture at the community college and had known Adrian for twenty years. She was one of the few people who no longer pretended to like everything he painted.

She walked into the studio carrying two coffees.

“Did you hear from the Ostrow?”

“Yes. They don’t want me.”

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be."

She handed him a cup and wandered among the canvases while Adrian talked about quitting teaching, perhaps selling the studio, perhaps doing something sensible for once in his life.

Then Mara stopped.

"What is that?"

Adrian knew exactly what she was looking at.

"Nothing."

She walked toward it.

Adrian!"

"It was an accident."

She ignored him.

For a long time, she stood in front of the canvas. Then she stepped back. Then forward again.

"What did you do?"

"I fell on it."

She looked at him.

"I'm serious."

"So am I."

He told her what had happened.

Mara listened without laughing.

When he finished, she turned back to the painting.

"Don't tell anyone that."

"Why?"

"Because they're going to ask."

"Who's going to ask?"

She looked at him.

"Everyone."

Mara photographed the painting and, despite Adrian's objections, sent the image to a curator she knew.

The next day the curator came to the studio.

A week after that, the painting was hanging in a group exhibition. The title was Adrian’s only contribution. He called it Fall into Destiny.

The reviews appeared almost immediately.

One critic described it as "a devastating meditation on identity and dissolution." Another praised "the violent intimacy of the artist's confrontation with the world around him." A third wrote that Adrian “had rejected the exhausted conventions of portraiture and replaced representation with physical presence."

Adrian read that sentence six times. He had no idea what it meant.

Fall into Destiny sold for eighteen thousand dollars.

Within a month, the Ostrow Gallery and several auction houses called. Adrian recognized the voice of the director who had rejected him.

"We've been following the response to your new work, Fall into Destiny. Quite extraordinary!”

"Thank you."

"We'd very much like to see what else you're doing in this direction."

Adrian looked across the studio at his brushes. "Of course," he said.

After the call, he sat for a very long time. The problem had arrived. He had created his masterpiece. Now he had to create another one.

For the next six weeks, Adrian tried.

He smeared paint with his hands. He pressed his cheek against canvases. He experimented with cloth, sponges, boards, even his own forearms. He attempted to reconstruct the colors that had been on his face that afternoon.

Everything looked contrived. Because it was. The original painting possessed something none of the others had: complete absence of intention, and total spontaneity. 

Adrian became desperate. Ostrow wanted six paintings for a solo exhibition. He had five months.

One evening he stood in the center of the studio staring at six blank canvases arranged along the wall.

Then his eyes drifted toward the corner. The broom was still there. He stared at it.

Slowly, Adrian placed several open cans of paint on the table. He loaded a palette. He positioned a canvas against the wall. Then he laid the corn broom carefully on the floor. 

He stepped back. He studied the arrangement. Something was wrong. He moved the broom three inches to the left. Then two inches back. He adjusted the palette so that it rested near the edge of the table. He loosened the lids on the paint cans. He stood in the middle of the room.

He closed his eyes. Then he stepped backward. Nothing happened. He opened one eye. He had missed the broom.

"Damn it."

He repositioned himself. Closed his eyes again. Stepped backward. His heel struck the bristles. The handle flew up. The table jumped. The palette launched into the air. Adrian lifted his face toward it.

A broom, a palette, a catastrophe. 

In the fraction of a second before the paint struck him, somewhere between the table and his nose, he wondered how he would ever teach the Fatslap technique.