The Road to the Studio
by Natalie Lemle
Per takes in the interior of the cabin: ivory and resined walnut, eight recliner-sized seats. Felix, his liaison at the gallery, has arranged for a “ride”—Per can’t think of the word without putting it in quotes—on the private plane of a collector who had been vacationing in St. Lucia. This guy only collects paintings by female artists featuring Black figures, Felix said. But you should talk about your new work anyway.
Not that it matters to Felix, but Per isn’t interested in talking about his work. It’s too dreamlike. He’d been going for the feeling of a fugue state, chaos glinting with beauty, not beauty itself. But the art world loves beauty. Collectors see in it a kind of truth, a truth that reveals value, and in the game of what thrives in the art market, beauty is a cheat code.
Per knows the collector lives in New York, that he is being generous by stopping in Indianapolis, that dearth of culture in the middle of a ghost-shaped state. But sitting opposite the collector on the white leather seats of someone who almost certainly doesn’t have kids—my paintings are my children, Per can hear him saying—he can’t bring himself to talk about his artwork. He can’t bring himself to talk about anything with this man whose sweatpants are clearly tailored, their length as calculated as the length of the hair on his head, which is graying at the temples.
And Per doesn’t care if he never sells another painting. Maybe his feelings will change when the lawsuit ends—if it ever ends—but maybe not. He admitted that to a reporter a few weeks ago in an interview for a profile in The Guardian, to Felix’s horror. The recent media interest, especially in the UK where he grew up, is motivated by the growing market interest in his work: a painting for which Per had been paid ten thousand dollars in 2006 had recently sold at auction for five million. Per didn’t see a dime from the auction house sale. But his prices at the gallery went up to reflect the new record. This is why Felix wants him to talk about his work with the collector.
Per isn’t impervious to the freedom that money provides. He wants to give his daughter and his wife a good life. In the forest of St. Lucia, yes—a place that feels more like home than London or New York ever did, maybe because of the way his father primed him to love it: the wild forests, the orange sky at sunset, the strange umami of spiny lobsters. It was the shock of leaving St. Lucia in 1959 that turned his father into the suspicious man that raised Per—that and the shock of life in London, the coldness in weather and the coldness in people. His father practically died of suspicion, in isolation, once Per crossed the ocean for grad school in New Haven and his parents divorced. In any case, Per is not making art to get rich. He is making art because it is the only thing he is fit to do, the only thing he can imagine for himself. But the art feels increasingly opposed to the salve of art itself; its curative ability to suspend suspicion.
Money—the outflow of it—makes the lawsuit all the more difficult to contend with. It has been going on for four years. When he was first summoned to the small courthouse in Gary, where he had spent one very long exchange year as a teenager, he didn’t show. It had to be a joke: some unknown man and a Chicago dealer suing Per jointly for failure to authenticate a painting. A painting he had supposedly made decades ago in Gary, Indiana.
The exchange program had billed the town, Gary, as a suburb of Chicago. He’d known of it from The Music Man, a show his mother, a former actress, had loved and auditioned for in its original run, before she met his father, before she got her British citizenship, before her career had been upended by the arrival of Per. Before she too had died, the only remaining reason to go to London now gone.
When the collector falls asleep, hands folded and upright, Per gazes out the window at the clouds: derivatives of themselves, split cells. The view is like a less pleasing version of a Georgia O’Keefe skyscape. Per loves O’Keefe in spite of himself, though he’d never admit it to anyone. She hid so much darkness in beautiful compositions, which is easier to do than the opposite—hiding beauty in a hellscape.
In Gary, there had been a palpable desperation in the air, which made people do terrible things. Per looked it up after the initial summons: over two thousand violent crimes in Gary on record for 1980, the year he was there. He was somewhat insulated from the violence by his host family, a retired couple whose children had fled to the coasts. The couple spent most of their time at church, where the wife played the bells.
Per mostly kept to himself at school, spending hours in the basement’s abandoned art studio; the school had long cut the art program, but the studio remained. He saved up his allowance and bought art supplies, which he shared with Heather, a frail-looking senior with wispy blonde bangs, two grades ahead of him. Heather’s mom had cosigned on a bank account for her tips from Steak’n Shake, then emptied it out to buy booze. Maybe I’ll end up a famous rich artist, Heather said. I’ll send her to the best rehab center in the state. They’d stood in front of O’Keefe’s “Sky above Clouds IV” together, Per is remembering now, on a field trip to the Art Institute of Chicago. You could do that, Per said to her.
The painting in question is a small canvas—a figureless enchanted swamp, foliage converging with water, the sky purple and pink. There are the initials PB in the lower right corner. He had seen the work initially as a photograph, and quickly dismissed it, not having had the proper context and not having recognized the names of anyone involved in the authentication request. But a year later, when he saw it in person in the courtroom in Gary, he did recognize it. He didn’t let his face betray the memory it triggered—how the initials had been an act of generosity on Heather’s part; you like the painting so much, claim it, she’d said. And as the hearings stacked up and eventually advanced to a higher court, his work in the market became more and more valuable, until what Heather and her husband stood to gain from winning the lawsuit was too dizzying to abandon.
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In thinking about the painting now, Per realizes it’s an abstraction of something he might have made—like the way it sounds when his wife, who is Italian, pronounces “Heather” (“hey-ah-tare”). It’s still her name and yet it isn’t when someone says it like that. But we’re always imposing our own phonologies onto other peoples’ identities, other peoples’ work. If we don’t see ourselves in something, we can still project ourselves onto it.
The collector clears his throat and asks Per if he’s pleased about the success of his painting in the sale a few weeks ago.
Per doesn’t have to think about it. I don’t create art so other people can make money from it, he says. And he realizes as he says this that he makes art because life is ugly but art doesn’t have to be, that anyone can generate a beautiful painting.
The collector bristles but presses on: It’s not validating that your work is valuable?
Who is it affecting? Per says.
Who do you think it affects? The collector asks as he tightens his seatbelt. The plane has started to sway like a train switching tracks at a fork in the rail. They’re descending.
As Per considers this, he feels a wave of relief wash over him, a sense that everything he hates about the machinations of the art market could add up to something gratifying, something beyond the rich getting richer. He gazes out the window and is surprised to observe a more complex topography than he realized Indiana had. There are vibrant greens, blues, orange teetering toward red. It reminds him of a painting by Hockney, an artist he’s not ashamed to admit he loves. The title of the work has something to do with Hockney’s drive from his house to his studio in the Hollywood Hills. Per can’t come up with it, the title. But another thought floats into his mind as they descend through the clouds, a decision made: he’ll claim the painting. Heather’s painting.
Natalie Lemle is a Boston-based writer and visual art advisor.