The Colorman by Erika Wood Page B

this.
    Karl’s charms were reserved for Rain alone. He was abrasive and contrary with other people, but could be quite unabashedly loving and worshipful when they were alone. Their intimate life was a lazy game for her, Karl’s passionate enthusiasm doing the work for both of them. The fact that her friends found Karl prickly and uncomfortable provided Rain with the perfect barrier between herself and the entertaining assortment of good friends she adored. It was a way to separate herself and give herself the time and devotion her art demanded, without having actually to make those claims about her time’s value herself.
    Rain found Karl’s irritability merely curmudgeonly and amusing and only very occasionally did his condescension touch her at all. Sometimes she wondered if this meant she was hugely egotistical, but she knew that her friends (and probably most strangers who encountered them together), saw her as a victim to his superiority and control.
    Years of work had left Rain’s studio filled up and richly messy. The shelves were piled high with supplies, the fridge held a more motley assortment of food and drink and the walls were covered with images ripped from magazines, postcards collected from museums, her own sketches, fields of color taped up next to each other.
    Though she’d known about it for several months, the reality of the end of this studio was fast approaching. The building had been sold and was slated for destruction. The entire block had finally been purchased by a single developer who had patiently fought years of rent-stabilized apartment dwellers and a little old tiny sliver of a building whose owner wouldn’t budge for decades, leading him to consider incorporating the little shoe repair shop’s building into the plans for his high-rise. The old man had finally died heirless, and the plans fell into place quickly afterward. It was part of the reason Rain had so readily agreed to go to England with Karl for the fall. She would move out of the studio, take the few months in England and then deal with finding a new space when she got back.
    Now there was an air of tragedy around her studio. This place she’d been most herself. This home.
    The smells: turp, mineral spirits and the earthy-nutty scent of paint glopped straight from the tube, along with the high note of linseed oil that lays over all the others—these were home. Even when Rain was low and uncertain and sure that she had nothing whatever to offer to the world, there were seventy-five things she could do in her studio to soothe her and make her feel like she was doing something right.
    If she was not already in the middle of a piece, there was the pleasant busy work of stretching a new canvas or gessoing. Gessoing was Rain’s favorite. The craft elements of the work were so satisfying. They had built-in and easy-to-achieve goals. She knew with certainty whether she’d succeeded at her task. Bubbling and rippling were failures. Slack fabric, off-square corners, missed spots—all these were clear failures. Success became humbly invisible, but once achieved, gave her a sense of a proper arena within which to freely take risks.
    This started with simply gathering up her materials; poking at the hardening lumps of paint on her palette with the palette knife, adding fresh dollops of whatever colors were low or too dry, picking this and that brush, round tapered filberts, flat square brights, tiny rounds and riggers, pouring out solvents and supports into little metal cups, adjusting lights or angling the canvas to catch the daylight from the big windows, changing the music. This last was key, a big part of creating the mood of whatever piece she was working on. She could still hear what she was listening to when she saw her old paintings. She’d typically crank up all the albums that Karl couldn’t stand when she was alone in her studio. King Crimson. The White Stripes. The Tom Tom Club.