A Nearly Perfect Copy - By Allison Amend Page 0,14

brought little warmth and tended to blow the electric lines. Fires were sometimes started in barrels, hobo style, but often smoked more than warmed, and tended to draw attention. Usually, the starving artists slaved away in the cold, wearing an unofficial uniform of scarves and fingerless gloves.

When Gabriel came to his area, it was dark and shadowed. A silhouette of a chair, the can of turpentine, a bouquet of brushes. He stood in the gloom for a moment and looked at his painting. He was painting large scale, much larger than he had at school. Édouard lent him stretchers; canvas was not too expensive; he mixed his own gesso. His paintings were Classical Realist, an evolution of the atelier method taught at the École. They usually showed public French spaces occupied by dozens of French figures who were not French: gypsies, Africans, Arabs.

After graduation, he thought he had left painting forever. In the rush of new technology, the increased digitalization of the world, he began a series of video installations. There was so much money at the end of the nineties that patrons practically gave him equipment and walls on which to project his art. He’d worked with a computer programmer, synchronizing screens and creating sound pieces to accompany them. But then everyone started manipulating video. His work became passé.

So he revisited his thesis, a series of canvases. They seemed to him now to show talent, a skill for color and composition, but they were also naïve, the work of someone who had yet to live in the real world. He was not embarrassed by them, but it was like looking at someone else’s work.

Occasionally he could conjure up that young, idealistic person again, but only in the realm of memory, swift flashes of sentiment that left as quickly as they arrived. He had changed, yes. Had he grown?

He’d spent a year away from his studio. It made him anxious to hear the industry of all the others in the space. He drank more than he should have. His right motorcycle boot developed a hole that the Russian cobbler couldn’t repair. And then one day he felt like painting again, and he went back to the studio, where nothing had changed, really, everyone still tossing paint at the wall or plastic in the mold, ending up with an anti-aesthetic, ugly and formless. He was rusty. He tried not to judge himself too harshly, but the inner critic was loud and unforgiving.

It took him six months to paint something halfway decent. Another year to perfect his canvas preparation technique (he liked a surface as smooth as poured resin, a process that required endless gesso and sandpaper).

Now Gabriel lined up his tubes of paint. He didn’t feel like painting tonight. He felt like lying on a couch and watching an old John Wayne movie on television. He felt like sitting in his mother’s kitchen watching her fry morcilla, hovering above the hearth like a medieval archangel. But he had no television (nor couch, for that matter) and his mother had been dead for a decade. He longed for a home, and that made him angry with himself. An artist thrived on imbalance, on the edge of deprivation, which made him strive for more. Comfort bred complacency. He leaned against the studio wall, which bowed under his meager weight. He straightened, steadied the wall.

This painting wasn’t done, but he wasn’t sure why. It was like a sentence left trailing off. It was like his French: fine, but not eloquent, not quite right. He was calling it La Gare, and it was simply the corner of a nonspecific railway station, a gypsy beggar and a woman having a nervous smoke. He was trying to work mostly with a gray palette, branching out into olives and mauves, but the subjects refused to blend adequately, almost like he had cut out and collaged separate paintings. There was something unfluid about his work. Gabriel’s professor at the École had called it “brutal.” The gallerist he’d convinced to pay a studio visit said it felt “unfiltered, diffuse.” But it wasn’t that. The canvas was somehow always present in his work. Like a helium balloon tethered to a chair, it was never able to transcend its medium.

When Gabriel was stuck, he liked to copy paintings in his sketchbook. He opened the dog-eared coffee table book he’d bought off the quai for ten euros at the end of a long, rainy day. A plate of Canaletto’s The Feast Day of