He taught us to believe in the imaginary but never to seek it because if we were to find it, a yearning would die away. And he was the father of all our yearnings—our fine art teacher.
He was gentle with our first efforts. Paint every time you cry. Paint as though you’re about to cry. A watercolor is a landscape seen through tears. Put on your grandfather’s glasses, stand behind the steamed-up windows of a train receding into the distance. Only when you recede into the distance can you appreciate just how close you are to the scenery.
Until the end of his life he remained attached to something that was always missing. To someone whose portrait was eternally paling. To him pale and flesh-toned were synonymous, or the same person, because it was only in the wan, foggy mornings that he fleetingly detected what he’d lost. But when the fog dissipated, we saw clearly the contours of a melancholy man.
He carried his sorrow around like a tripod, the three legs sharp as blades, like the three points of breathing. And the pierced air bled a new hue every time. He painted but never showed his paintings. We hypothesized what they may have depicted based on that day’s assignment.
Split your canvas in two. On the left, paint your happiest day, on the right, your unhappiest. As homework, paint the line you put between the two days as the interior of a house.
He gave all our houses perfect scores. Regardless of whether they were overly busy and colorful or multistoried and structurally impossible, he marked every last one as excellent. The other teachers reminded him this was not sustainable or didactic, that he was cutting off our limbs, maiming our criteria for what was proper and aesthetic. Who am I to edit a child’s view of the world, he defended himself.
His refusal to dictate the direction of the human gaze was the most permanent belief in his world: Something like the child he could have had and raised in a house just like other people did. Just like is the death of all art, he said. He’d saved himself on numerous occasions—he could have had a studio just like, fame just like, muses just like. He allowed himself what ifs only with colors and preconceptions.
He often had us over to his home. Come here anytime. Some of us went for confirmation that the house was empty, others went and saw in the emptiness the space to finish a painting. He worked more with the second group. He domesticated them for the wild.
Once, he split our class in two. Thematically. One half was to paint the perfect life, the other—man’s best friend. He wanted us to see whether there would be a difference. As he helped us discover it, he calibrated our senses to feel that everything is all the same, it matters only who is holding the brush.
Here we are now, cleaving all of sorrow. Not all of us, his disciples, are here; but couldn’t any one of us contain this universal loss. Our fine art teacher lies in a coffin. Some kind of thrown together, absurd final portrait. A charcoal painting in candlelight. That’s one he didn’t show us in school. I’d never considered a coffin as an easel before. People walk up, they lean over, then each person paints according to the saturation of his individual loss. The collective canvas of farewell. After it’s framed, the painting is lowered into storage, but the exhibition continues. It will last as long as there is someone to talk about it.
Our life began with cave drawings and it’ll end inside a painting of a prefab Soviet block, our teacher liked to joke.
He taught us well: Everything, every last fragment, is on par with the whole.
Something like gathering carnations and candles into a nature morte painting above a portrait of deeply shut eyes amid a landscape of forlorn faces.
