3 EXODUS OF THE EXQUISITE
3
E XODUS OF THE E XQUISITE
As thesis painters, we had the whole sixth floor of Grainer to use as our classroom and workspace. That was where we gathered officially four days out of the week, though I found within the first few days of our senior year that most of the painting majors ended up there every night—the motion lights stayed on all the time, and no one ever locked up.
The sixth floor was the highest point on campus, rivaled only by the Chapel’s steeple. Most of the buildings dated back to the 1880s when Rotham first sprung to life as a trade school for agricultural engineers. Grainer was no exception—inside it was warm and rich, everything made of oiled wood and veined stone. There was no air-conditioning, and the freight elevator only worked half of the time, so climbing to the sixth floor left me sweaty and heaving each time. But the ceilings were tall and crosshatched by wooden beams dotted with industrial fans. Arched windows lined the wall and cut the grid of our studios into rectangles of light. Viewed from above, it was a maze—fifteen blank rooms with walls that rose over our heads and met open air, with a worktable, an easel, and a stool waiting for each student’s use. At the center of the room, near the doorway where the stairwell descended, a white wall waited with a half circle of foldable metal chairs dragged up to it, a designated space where we would hang our work for critique. To the right of that sat three sinks and a vat for excess oil paint and dirty rags. The lesson had been drilled into us since our first painting class—proper disposal was important. We were children playing with chemicals, trying to make something beautiful out of the mess before it had a chance to wreak havoc on our internal organs. Rotham did not want to be responsible for killing us.
I toured the studio with my parents the spring I turned eighteen. I’d loved it with fearful immediacy, self-consciously adoring as I peered into each student’s space to witness the alchemy they had made of them. Canvases spanned each one from corner to corner, the floorboards littered with scraps and worktables piled with curled tubes of half-consumed paint. Sheets of fabric were pinned to plaster and the windows made trapezoids across them, highlighting wet brush strokes down to the frayed edges where scissors had snipped them into pieces. Everything smelled of linseed oil and the funk of wet plaster. A sink dripped, always, forever, echoed by the scuffling of something mammalian in the rafters. My parents hadn’t been impressed. They thought the room was dirty and not worth the exorbitant price tag. But I was enamored. I thought that if I could spend a year in that room—a month, a day, a minute—I could become a smarter version of myself. I could make something impressive. Something worthy of hanging on a wall and drinking in.
I signed the papers—admissions and loans, clauses and acceptances, a lifetime of debt and the chance to make something worthwhile. I committed myself to possibility.
When it came to the reality of being a Rotham student, none of us loved the institution of school itself. Well, I guess I did a little—in a private way I admitted to few people other than Amrita. Rotham could be money hungry and disorganized. Our studios were cramped boxes with a mouse problem. Indiana was a droll cornfield where the only options for fun had to be swallowed or smoked, and the train took three hours to ferry us into the heart of Chicago. Still, we showed up to class every day, mostly on time. Because we had a common goal. And because we all adored Moody.
There were eleven painting majors in total. The five of us were a unified and insular near-half of that student body. Some of them we admired; some of them we hated; and the ones that fell beyond those black-and-white boundaries became characters instead, typically designated by nicknames sprouting out of some odd incident that mattered to no one but our group, like Cameron, who Caroline dubbed “Big Shoes” after he wore a ridiculous pair of boots every day of our freshman year. Of course, this language and cast of characters existed only to our audience of five. And to everyone else, we were probably incredibly annoying. But we loved to bask in that shared awareness, understood only by one another, conversations held with silent flickers of a gaze and the slightest twitch of lips. If you got it, then you got it. We weren’t sharing.
Rotham wasn’t a same-sex college, but its student population was overwhelmingly female, and that demographic made itself apparent. So it made sense that we all admired Jennifer Mooden. There was something unnervingly alluring about our senior mentor that made me want to be more . More engaging or desirable, more intelligent or conscious of the space I commanded. Capable of commanding space at all.
Moody, as we affectionately called her, stood at nearly six feet in her heeled boots. Her hair had gone prematurely gray—Saz once scoured her Facebook for hours to find proof of its beginning in her midtwenties—and it fell to her waist in a great cloud unless she clipped it up and revealed the dangling earring on her right ear. When we first met Moody, Seminar professor in our junior year, I used to spend the full three hours of our class’s discussion staring at the simple silver chain and the black stone hanging from it. Amrita had once stopped Moody in the hall to tell her she was missing an earring. We never let her live that one down. Women like Moody didn’t need the adornment of two—a single jewel was a statement of its own.
She was just as elegant the morning of our first class of senior year, perched on a stool before our waning moon of metal chairs with the critique wall behind her. The studio burned hellfire hot despite the overhead fans. As a result, her hair was up in its clip, leaving the shoulders of her dress bare. Past the cuffed sleeves, fine line tattoos unfurled down to where her hands clutched a hot coffee. Everything smelled peaty and overwarm, in a way that made my mouth cottony. I looked at Moody’s paper cup and sweated.
I was hungover. The pond water left my hair feeling like straw even after a still-drunk early-morning shower, and just over two hours of sleep hadn’t been enough to bring me to life. The rest of the group didn’t seem to be faring much better than I was—I had no clue when the festivities of First Night finally tapered off, but Saz, Caroline, Amrita, and I had left around three, when I was pleasantly drunk enough to barely keep Saz’s wasted form upright. Finch stayed, claiming she wanted to talk to Thea about something. I tried to pretend that part had disappeared to the fuzziest inebriated corner of my mind. I should have been even drunker. I should have sloughed the thoughts off and let them sink somewhere syrupy and black.
Now Finch slouched in the chair to my right, and Amrita sat rigidly upright to my left. I was acutely aware of the heat and how sticky it left my bare arms, and what it might feel like if I shuffled an inch closer and pressed my elbow to Finch’s.
Condensation ran off my coffee and left a ring where my denim shorts met my thigh. I dragged a thumb through it absentmindedly until Amrita touched my arm. Amrita looked fine, though she always did. Her hair was braided away from her face again, and her gauzy button-down sat open over a black dress. Caroline stood behind Finch with her arms crossed over her chest, blond hair a glossy sheet under the glow pouring in from the windows. She hated to sit if she didn’t have to. I envied the defined line of her calves.
“It looks like we’re still missing one,” Moody said, thumbing through the packet on her lap and dragging her finger down a list of names. The bodies in the room fidgeted as if marionetted by her hand. My gaze passed over the faces that had been obscured by shadow during the First Night swim, the remainder of our motley eleven—Veda, Phoebe, Cameron, Mars, Thea, and Yejun. Some of them I knew better than others. Some of them probably hated me for my proximity to Finch and Caroline, the polarizing and enigmatic kingpins of our class. But that was the only threat I posed—I didn’t think any of them thought of me as a good enough artist to have a shot at Solo, and for the most part I shared their assumptions. It was seductive to hover in someone else’s shadow and allow myself to remain obscured, especially if it was an outline I adored.
“Well, you all paid for my time. I suppose I won’t waste any more of it.” Moody slapped the papers against her thigh and stood to face the critique wall. Its fresh coat of paint turned it into a blank canvas. I wanted to stand beside Moody and drag a brush over it. Wanted to leave a lasting mark.
I felt Finch prepare to whisper before I heard her voice—warm breath against my already hot ear, sweat prickling along my hairline. “Where the fuck is Saz?”
I shrugged and spared a quick glance at the door. Moody dragged a hand across the wall in an arc, like marking a half circle in the plaster with her touch.
“Creation,” Moody said, “is a window cut into the head.”
A curious chorus of hmm s echoed around the room, as if we were at a slam poetry performance. I expected someone to start snapping.
“It sounds violent, and it is. You came here for violence. You came here to push your creativity to its limits. You’ve spent years honing the ideas that you want to express to your audience, and you’ve learned the techniques to make them possible. In that process, you’ve pried open a window and invited us to peer inside.”
Still staring at that blank wall, Moody tapped her temple once. I wanted to close my eyes and picture it—a chasm carved into the veneer of my skull, my interior on display. Instead, I fidgeted with the ring on my thumb.
Finch wouldn’t give up. Her whisper was even closer this time. “Didn’t she come with you guys? Or did she oversleep?”
Saz was always oversleeping. But Caroline had been the one to wake her up that morning, our first as a household, one foot prodding the edge of Saz’s stiff Rotham-issued mattress as she yelled, “ You have five minutes before we leave without you! ”
“She wanted coffee, and the line was long,” I finally whispered back.
Moody faced us again. I straightened. I could feel someone staring at Finch and me, and the discomfiting awareness was nearly all-consuming enough for the whine in my ears to tune Moody out.
“I am not an overlord. I am barely even a teacher. Those of you who have attended one of my classes before know this,” she said as she yanked her stool closer with a shriek of metal and sat again. “Trying to create something because you expect it will satisfy me or help you pass this class is not a goal. It’s an excuse. I’m an artist, like I expect you to have grown into, and we are sharing a creative space with the intention of building a thesis. You’re showing me your reason for sitting in this room. You want me to engage with it. You want me to believe it so wholeheartedly that I”—she paused to run her finger down the list of names—“make a mark on this page and signal you as a standout. As an artist worthy of being witnessed en Solo .”
Chills prickled along my arms and the nape of my neck. Sometimes, when it was just us, Caroline would make fun of the way Moody talked—she’d put on a haughty voice that sounded nothing like Moody’s true crisp consonants and parade around with her arms crossed over her chest saying things like “Think about the bodily experience of the canvas, Ms. Aster,” and “Can a tube of paint have a narrative of its own , Ms. Aster?” And we’d obediently howl with laughter. But I was afraid to tell the rest of them that I liked the way Moody spoke. I liked her weird inflections and her ferocious pretentiousness and her eerie omniscience. I thought if I could be a fraction closer to her orbit, maybe I could understand what I was doing among those talented painters, why I thought I had any right to claim the same Solo title they did when I could barely figure out what I was meant to paint half the time. Up until this point, I’d mostly focused on detailed landscapes from my childhood. Sometimes I sketched my women, but I hesitated to commit to putting them down in paint. I just thought they were beautiful. I wanted Moody to think they were beautiful too.
Footsteps on the stairs announced her before the rest of us swiveled to look. Saz entered with a tote bag hanging from the ditch of her elbow, aforementioned coffee in the hand connected to it, ribbons hanging from two tiny black braids and her shorts frayed at the ends where they clung to her thighs.
“Sorry, sorry, carry on, please!” she said in a too-loud attempt at a whisper. Moody’s gaze trailed Saz from the door to the seat that she claimed behind me. Saz gave me a pat on the head as a hello, and I sank in my chair, embarrassed to have been singled out.
“The time you spend in this studio is directly correlated to your effort,” Moody continued, thumb pressing into a spot on the paper where I imagined Sarah “Saz” Murphy-Choi was listed. “I’m not here to pass judgment on your character or grade your homework. We’re sharing a collaborative space. I expect you to show up on time and stay late and forfeit your weekends if you need to. Because if you aren’t doing those things, you are performing a disservice to yourself and your peers when you show up to our group critiques. Lackluster effort will leave you with a painting vying for attention in a crowded group show, while your classmate’s entire body of work hangs en Solo .” Moody leaned forward, elbows propped on her knees, hair akimbo in its clip. “Got it?”
A sea of fervent nods, my own included. Finch’s hand rested on her knee, her anxiety apparent in her thumb’s grazing back and forth across her jeans. The floor creaked as Caroline shifted her weight. Amrita’s pen scratched across a notepad as she took notes and Saz leaned forward to read over her shoulder.
“I’m sure many of you have understood how this year will go since you stepped onto campus. In fact, I’d be disappointed if you didn’t.” For the first time that day, Moody smiled. “But as the course requires, we’ll walk through the timeline together.”
She rolled the packet in her hand until it was a thin tube and gestured to the rest of the room behind us. “We’ll begin by establishing studios, setting up your materials, and personalizing your spaces. You are free to do anything in your cubicle that does not cause irreversible damage to school property. If it can be cleaned up or painted over, you’re free to go wild. Oh—and you can’t sleep here. Pay your rent and get out of my hair.”
That got a few laughs. Her smile widened, but her eyes remained serious. “You will create a body of work composed of at least twenty pieces of art. This is, of course, up to interpretation in your practice, but you should work with the expectation of filling the atrium’s Solo Gallery. Those of you who are not selected will be expected to choose one to two pieces from your portfolio to hang in our Senior Show at the end of the year.”
Uncomfortable silence. I shifted, one foot starting to fall asleep. “Mandatory class occurs Monday through Friday, ten a.m. to four p.m., though I expect you will find yourself in this room outside of those hours on most days. On Wednesday mornings you will attend your Fine Arts Seminar with Professor Kolesnik, where you’ll craft thesis papers and learn how to market the work you’re creating. These first couple months, I will have one-on-one visits with each of you to discuss your progress. After that, we will have voluntary critiques. If you don’t sign up, you don’t get a critique. If you don’t get a critique, then deal with the consequences.”
My stomach fluttered at the thought of Moody evaluating whatever I had created, then curdled when I realized that meant the rest of them would scrutinize my paintings too.
“When you all return from Thanksgiving break, we will hold Survey. This is an open critique with fellow professors, alumni, and art professionals invited into the Grainer Gallery to view the progress on your thesis work and give you direction. Directly after Survey, your class will be narrowed down to the top five students who can expect to have a chance at Soloing. You will take their feedback and apply it to your work throughout the spring, until it is time for a panel of Rotham professors and guest artists to select the Soloist. Unselected students will choose their best piece to be presented in Grainer Gallery’s group show. Any questions?”
This time we all shook our heads. If I hadn’t had my hands knotted together, they would have been shaking.
“Alright. Now that that’s settled. You’ve each been randomly assigned a number that designates your individual studio space.” Moody’s gaze returned to the unrolled packet. “When I call your name and number, you may go find your studio. Fill out the card beside your doorway with your name, and then we’ll gather again to discuss how the next week is going to kick off.”
I straightened, heart pounding, and tried not to look at the others—I wanted to be close to them and also wanted to get as far away as I possibly could so I couldn’t spend the entirety of my time comparing myself to them, afraid of always being the one who would fall flat.
“Phoebe Arnett, Studio 6,” Moody began. “Caroline Aster, Studio 4. Amrita Balakrishnan, Studio 7. Veda Chaudhry, Studio 1. Cameron De Luca, Studio 2.”
People started to move. Amrita touched my shoulder as she stood and followed Caroline, already stalking through the maze of rooms and scanning the labels on the exterior walls with a determined frown. Moody continued to list off names.
“Jodie Finchard, Studio 10.” Finch’s chair groaned when she rose. I kept my eyes on my hands. “Mars Jackson, Studio 3. Yejun Kim, Studio 8. Joanna Kozak, Studio 11. Sarah Murphy-Choi, Studio 9. Thea Russell, Studio 5.”
Finch had already disappeared by the time I started to weave down the halls. The studios closest to the critique wall were 1 and 15—that meant the path followed in a spiral, with the center cubicles falling between 6 and 9 and the other studios containing the rest of us—which also meant that I was beside Finch. The two of us were tucked away in a corner of that murine conglomeration.
“Hey, neighbor,” Saz greeted when I reached my studio, poking her head out of 9 with a grin.
There was no door, just a cutout that served as an entryway. Inside my cubicle were three blank plaster walls that met a brick one with an enormous window stretching high overhead. Before the window sat a worktable. Beneath the table was a cabinet of drawers for supplies, and across from it stood a metal easel and a stool. The walls were freshly painted, the floor stained in places, dust gathered in the corners. Beyond the lower panes of the glass where the elements caked a fine film, Rotham unfolded like a pop-up book, the Chapel perforating the clouds. I could see myself sitting there before it, could imagine that table piled high with materials: my glass palette with its mountain range of dried paints in shades of cadmium and titanium and ultramarine and phthalo, brushes still slick with safflower oil no matter how many times I scrubbed them in the sink, the chemical waft of turpentine and the tang of linseed forever dried into my rags and my apron and my skin. There would be no delineation between work and body. This room would become an extension of me until the work the two of us produced could transmogrify into something worthy of standing on its own. Or, as Moody liked to say, of performing en Solo .
It wasn’t necessarily a healthy thought. But I hadn’t come to Rotham to live wisely.
“It’s a nice view, right?”
Finch stood behind me in the doorway, smiling the kind of tight-lipped grin that told me she was thrilled and she didn’t want anyone else to know it. Up close I could see where her eyeliner had smudged and sweat dampened her cheeks. “I can’t believe we share a wall,” she continued. “Everyone else is going to be so jealous.”
Moody’s voice carried throughout the room as she called, “After you find your studio, report back to me for further discussion ...”
“Jo,” Finch said, the sudden sensation of her fingers encircling one of my wrists and squeezing, searing me all the way down to my feet. I blinked back at her, shaken awake. “I said , are you excited to get to work?”
“Sure,” I answered immediately. “Of course I am.”
It was the truth. But beneath the excitement lived a pit-dark hunger—dread that coiled and waited for my joy to wear off, and contention to encroach in its stead.