4 THE BURDEN OF BURNING
4
T HE B URDEN OF B URNING
I had no fucking idea what I was doing.
This was the doubt that became my mantra in our first few days back at Rotham. I was supposed to have come to our final year with a plan for my thesis, but I was afraid I’d forgotten how to paint anything at all. Instead of answers, I sought routine.
Those days moved like this: I’d wake up around eight. By eight thirty we’d all gather around the kitchen table, save for Saz, who made it down by nine about 70 percent of the time. Breakfast was one of my favorite things about living with them. Caroline made the coffee, and Amrita made the tea. We usually fended for ourselves when it came to eating, settling on a granola bar or a cup of yogurt. If we cooked, it was me or Amrita feeding everyone else. Amrita was the best at making eggs, but I liked to fry up potatoes and whatever vegetables would otherwise eventually rot in our shared fridge. In some ways, it was a part of our language. I wanted to show them I cared. So I fed them.
We’d meet Finch in Banemast by nine fifteen for another round of coffee. Then it was the hike up the stairs to the top of Grainer. The heat rose as we climbed, panting the whole way and dreaming of the coming winter. Moody was always there before us, no matter how early we tried to arrive.
“Do you think she ever leaves?” Caroline asked once as we hauled ourselves up the marble flights. The climb never seemed to affect her. Her breathing always remained steady. “I have a feeling that when the room empties out and the lights go off, she keeps sitting on her stool, staring at the critique wall and waiting for us to come back.”
“That’s just a wet dream of yours,” Finch called behind us, and dissolved into laughter when Caroline told her to go fuck yourself.
Amrita gestured at the cameras in the high corners of the stairwell. “She can probably hear everything you’re saying.”
Finch shook her head. “Remember when someone stole my phone last year out of Wolitz’s class on the fifth floor? I asked them to check the security footage, and administration told me they’re just props meant to discourage theft. What’s the fucking point?”
The first two mornings in the studio started with Moody’s announcements about whose studios she planned to visit for chats that day, and then we’d split up with the intention of making a masterpiece or twenty.
There was an immense, unbridled pleasure in filling the space with pieces of myself. I hauled all my materials from the Manor and started to fill my studio—paint tubes in the cabinet drawers, a cheery yellow coffee can full of brushes, color-caked glass palette on the worktable, a roll of unstretched and unprimed canvas worth more than most of my possessions combined propped up against a wall. Palette knives and box cutters and spackling trowels. A stack of books leaned against a tub of primer: Hold Still by Sally Mann, a retrospective of Cy Twombly’s work, The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, dog-eared essays about Jenna Gribbon, a thrifted volume on medieval beasts in art.
Moody came to me on Tuesday with a knock on my studio. “Ready for a chat?” she asked, leaning against the doorframe in a sleek A-line dress, wrists rimmed in bracelets and her hair heavy around her shoulders. She had a pair of glasses pushed up on her head, pinning loose strands away from her eyes and revealing that one stone earring, swinging on its chain.
“Of course,” I answered. I gestured to the stool and she smiled as she took it, sitting on her hands. I felt like a child beside her in a dirty pair of jeans. There was a certain elegance to her that I would never be able to emulate.
My progress so far was two yards of canvas unrolled and pinned to a blank wall. It hung there from a row of nails beside a few charcoal sketches that I’d spent the first day making.
“Unstretched?” Moody asked, nodding at the fabric.
She meant my canvas—traditionally, a painter would construct a frame of four wooden bars and cut a length of canvas to fit it. Then they’d staple it into place and apply layers of a thick white primer called gesso , sanding between each to smooth down the surface, until it was a substrate that paints could be applied to. Over my years at Rotham, I’d taken the more tactile route of leaving the canvas naked and loose like a scroll and painting directly on the wall. The process was satisfyingly physical. But I was always doubting myself. I would get halfway through a painting and fear that I had made the wrong decision from the start.
Moody leaned in to get a closer look at the sketches. Several showed depictions of the same moment—my women around our dining table in the Manor, silhouetted by the faint glow of a lamp, heads thrown back in laughter or knees pulled up beneath their chins. Below those was a sketch of the four of them sitting on the beach in Michigan, Caroline’s head in Saz’s lap and her eyes locked on the viewer.
“Portraiture,” Moody said thoughtfully. “This is a little different from how you described your previous work to me. Tell me more about it.”
I wanted to say something that might impress her. Wanted to express the way I felt when I made the sketches, which was akin to coming home, like their lives could melt into mine until no lines remained.
“I’m always trying to depict family,” I said, talking with my hands, face already heating up as I fumbled over the words, “you know, like, old photos, and artifacts, and traditions. But I’ve been thinking about doing it with scenes of my friends from my life and how we’ve crafted a family here, together.”
She hummed. I couldn’t tell what that meant. Finally, she said, “I think it’s a nice time capsule. It’s rare to have friendships like those later in life, and they don’t last forever.”
I stood in resolute silence. Not me, I wanted to say, not us. We might change, but if we did, we’d change for the better—because we chose each other, because we made each other more interesting, because I felt most myself when they witnessed me.
“I want you to push the boundaries. I don’t want idyllic scenes forever—I want to see every fraction of the good and bad in these relationships depicted through your figurations. Give me something to work with, Joanna.”
As if summoned by our conversation, Finch passed my studio door with an empty canvas frame hooked over her shoulder and a staple gun in one hand. Her gaze hesitated on Moody, then flickered up to me. She shared a conspiratorial smile and wriggled her empty hand at me before she disappeared.
Heat in my cheeks again. A sudden prickling of emotion behind my eyes. I lacked the words for the way it made me feel when she looked at me like that, as if she were so pleased to see me. Such a wordless feeling. Like learning to speak all over again.
If I could convey it with paint, then maybe Moody would be able to feel it too.
Wednesday was our first class with Professor Kolesnik. It was a three-hour morning seminar, with the afternoon available for either an additional elective class or an open time block that could be spent at the studio. Most of us chose extra studio time, though Amrita surprised us all by signing up for some obscure class called Theory of Craft: How Visual Artists Interpret Practical Work, and Saz selected Professor Williams’s The Art of the Book.
Rotham’s idea of a “lecture hall” was a room filled with enough seats for our class of eleven and a podium and desk for Kolesnik at the front. He was a burly man, tall and solid and mostly bald. He wore his shirtsleeves cuffed up to the elbows to reveal copious amounts of the hair missing from his head. This was what I focused on every time he gestured to the syllabus for the semester on the board.
Seminar had been a part of our curriculum every year since we started attending Rotham. It was a discussion intended to help us better navigate the professional art world and shape our theses, though Seminars in the past had usually ended up as lectures where professors talked at us for three hours about the importance of different painters throughout history. Kolesnik, however, quickly let us know that we would not get away with silence. If he asked a question, we were expected to answer it—with enthusiasm.
The warring animals inside me begged to please him and resented his attention. Kolesnik was notoriously hard on all students, and receiving his approval felt like hard-earned validation. As a working artist with gallery representation for the past forty-six years, he was one of Rotham’s most revered staff members, and it was considered a privilege to take his class throughout our senior year. But there was another facet to his status as a tenured professor at Rotham—plenty of reviews on his Rate My Professors profile claimed that his lingering eyes and wandering hands made him uncomfortable to interact with. It wasn’t a problem I had endured, but my boyish gawkiness typically gave me a kind of invisibility when it came to men, unless it was a slur slung at me on the street. Caroline, however, took his Art and Activism in the ’80s course our junior year and dubbed him “Professor Perv” within the first week. And Moody always got a look in her eyes when he was mentioned; one that I read as a deep, unhurried resentment.
Still—he was a resource we were expected to take advantage of if we had plans of Soloing. He had established himself as an admirable and frustrating leader. Kolesnik’s roots in Abstract Expressionism were evident in his work, which consisted of the Jackson Pollock-y drips we were all more than familiar with by now in bruised hues that gave his paintings the pinkened bodily tones of a Philip Guston piece. Beyond his individual practice, he was also instrumental in implementing traditions that were now commonplace at Rotham, like the annual Masquerade Grotesque that took place every Halloween, where students designed their own masked apparel and Kolesnik led the party in an exquisitely crafted boar costume that earned him the bristly and accurate title of Boar King.
Even without the fur coat and its tusked hood, he was imposing. Mars shifted in their seat in front of me as Cameron slouched down in his. Veda sat between Phoebe and Yejun. Finch had arrived before the rest of us to claim the seat beside Thea—a sight that managed to unnerve me just as much as Kolesnik’s presence.
“Painting isn’t even half the work,” Kolesnik announced. “Maybe a fourth of it, if that. Beyond Rotham’s confines, you’ll find that your art is a by-product of the process of being a working artist. Sure, you’re painting for you, because you want to. But when you leave your Grainer studio, your work happens alone. The real meat of a community—of the community you’re trying to stake a claim in—is the way you’re able to talk to others. You need to be capable of selling yourself to someone who doesn’t give a shit about you. And the only way you’re going to accomplish that is by knowing what you stand for and how to make someone else believe in it, too.”
Kolesnik smiled beneath his beard. The expression might have looked like joy on anyone else, but on him it was scrutiny. Amrita took notes beside me, clicking away on her laptop keys.
“Over the course of the year, you’ll complete a ten-page thesis paper as an exploration of your thesis. This paper is intended to help you learn how to talk about your work commercially until you feel prepared to market yourself with gallerists, curators, and buyers. At the end of the year, you will condense this paper into an artist statement that can be shown with your work. This will either exist as a sheet that accompanies your biography and a price list at your Solo Show, or it will be a printout pinned to the wall beside the piece or two you get to display in Grainer. I don’t think I need to tell you which option holds more weight, do I?”
We all shook our heads, except for Cameron, who raised one hand and kept the other crossed over his chest. The air conditioner ruffled the black hair at the nape of his neck where it curled with sweat. “What’s the point of the thesis paper then, if we’re boiling down the same concept to one digestible page?”
“Could you give me that page right now?” Kolesnik asked. “Could you summarize your work in a succinct passage that would make me look at you and think, yes, this kid should Solo?”
I stared at the back of Cameron’s head, at the way the muscles in his neck strained as his jaw worked.
“See,” Kolesnik continued. “I don’t think you could. I don’t think any of you could. I’m sure that you think you might be capable of it, and I’d bet that you could write a few paragraphs down and hand them over, hell, by the end of the day. But it wouldn’t mean anything to me. It would be the musings of a kid trying to talk their way to a reward. And that’s not what we’re doing here, is it? You want to be an artist. Okay, I’m listening. But you came to Rotham because it promised to shape you into an artist that innovates. You invested yourself and expected to glean results, so you’re going to do it the way I tell you to, and you’ll understand why when you finish this paper and see what it has taught you about yourself.”
Kolesnik’s hands gripped the edge of his desk as he leaned against it. Together they made a hulking being—all dark wood and massive shoulders. I could smell solvent clinging to someone’s clothes. Maybe even my own.
“Any more questions?”
Another round of shaking heads. Cameron remained silent. Kolesnik clapped his hands together, and I jumped with the sound.
“Good. Let’s talk about timelines. If you pull up the email you received last week with the syllabus, you’ll see that—”
He paused and sniffled hard, then pressed a knuckle beneath his nose. When he pulled it away, his hand was smeared with red. “Damn. Nosebleed. Alright, pull up that email and give me a moment.” He yanked a few tissues out of the box and stepped into the hall, noisily blowing his nose, and I watched Caroline’s face crease with repulsion.
A text window from our group chat popped up over the notes on Amrita’s screen and snared my eyes. The blue bubble of Caroline’s text read: bro he’s such a dick.
Saz sent a GIF of a gorilla beating its fists on its chest.
Then Finch: he’s subjecting us to a three-hour jerk off session. Anyone want to get lunch after this?
She was right. But nothing could have killed the part of myself that rose to meet him—that wanted to work hard and prove myself. That wanted him to read what I produced and tell me that I had impressed him.
Did that make me terrible too?
Working at the library was the perfect job because it had given me my Finch. The Finch that unfolded in our privacy, unconcerned with being the top of the class or fitting into the mechanics of our group, her casual, warm, cocky self, the one that seized my heart, the one that fostered a festering crush that had clung to me since we started the job halfway through our freshman year.
We walked to our shift together down the promenade. Campus boomed with late-summer thunder as it tapered off from an afternoon storm. We’d hidden from the rain in Grainer after Kolesnik’s class, where I was unable to accomplish anything other than perch on my stool, staring at the tentative brushstrokes I’d made on my first painting and spiraling into stagnancy.
“I don’t know how we’re going to last a full year with that guy,” Finch sighed, one hand hooked in the strap of her tote bag and the other swinging by her side as she walked. My pinky brushed hers: once, twice. I tried to focus on sidestepping puddles in the brick path.
“Could be worse,” I said. “He could be Aysel.”
Aysel Polat was the printmaking professor our junior year who told Finch and me we were too pretty to be gay after Finch spent a semester crafting a poster that read BIKINI KRILL in blocky letterpress type under a crude illustration of two shrimp kissing. It had taken months of complaining to the Fine Arts Department to drum up some accountability for his actions and a reminder from Caroline of the hefty donations her family provided before Rotham finally fired him.
“I think Kolesnik is the type to give Aysel a run for his money. During last year’s Junior Survey, he told me that my paintings made him want to prescribe me fresh air by the sea for my obvious hysteria,” Finch said.
I laughed. Finch shoved me, fingertips circling my bicep for a beat of time that made me shiver.
“Ignore him,” I said. “He’s senile. He doesn’t understand what you’re going for.”
She held the library door for me and gestured for me to enter, tilting her head with a wry smile. “And what is it that I’m going for, Jo?”
“Nightmare fuel,” I answered, and her laughter trailed behind me all the way down to the library’s basement. Rotham’s subterranean level consisted of a massive archive—shelves and shelves of library-exclusive material that wasn’t allowed to leave the building. We waved to Kirsten, the lead researcher who handled most of the acquisitions in the library’s collection, and headed down the hall leading to the equipment office where Finch and I worked. The walk was interspersed with a glass display case, illuminated by hundreds of tiny bulbs. Inside it was Kolesnik’s Boar King costume with some of the other famous masks from Masquerade Grotesques in the past. Eyeless structures watched us pass by—rabbits with long and patterned teeth, hulking hides wrapped around the shoulders, clown faces painted on plaster, narrow beaks with bursting plumage that turned the whole display into a burlesque performance. I hated that case—it always made me feel as if someone’s eyes were on me, no matter what path I walked.
Finch unlocked the office and flopped into her rolling chair. Our shared L-shaped desk was a bulky antique much like Kolesnik’s, with a computer for each of us to work on. I sifted through papers and pulled out the log for the evening. Our primary task was to help students rent photo and film equipment, so sometimes we spent whole hours with nothing to do, mostly dicking around and sending vapid videos back and forth to each other and trying not to laugh loud enough for Kirsten to hear us.
I took so much pleasure in the quiet contentment of my own private Finch. It’d been that way since we met in the equipment room, eager scholarship students up to our ears in debt trying to make enough extra cash to splurge on good oil paints and something other than the garbage they served in Banemast. Up until that point, Amrita was my best and only friend; we woke together, walked side by side to every class, ate every meal across from each other in Bane. And while that was enough—more than enough really, the first time I’d ever felt entirely unencumbered by a friendship to that degree—upon first sight, I was immediately enamored with and intimidated by Jodie Finchard.
Pretty was the wrong word for her, but it was a repeating thought I couldn’t banish. Charming was a better fit. Irreplicable. Entrancing. She was only an inch taller than me, but I always pictured her bigger, louder, gave her more space in my head than she truly took up. She was always fidgeting, warm no matter who was on the other end of a greeting. Attention from Finch made me feel cooler than I actually was, like some of her magnetism rubbed off with a hello. She was enigmatic. Unassuming and flawed—faint spots suggesting teenage acne on her cheeks, a scar in her eyebrow from an old piercing, the skin around her knuckles red where they dried and cracked every winter. Her hair was overgrown in a forgetful, masculine way, fine and dark and swept behind the ears as if she wanted to pretend it wasn’t present. Sometimes while working, she would knot it at the nape of her neck with a rubber band, thin strands framing the lines of her face. She made it easy to understand why everyone said Rotham was such a competitive school. I looked at her and instantly wanted to be prettier, smarter, clever enough to make her laugh. And when I did for the first time—in such an inane way, by holding a stapler up beside my mouth and clicking it together to make it talk in an imitation of Kirsten’s voice—her resulting grin made my heart pound with obsessive delight.
“Thank god you work here,” she’d said when the laughter had finally died down and I was blushing with the pleasure of having put that smile on her face. “I can’t imagine wanting to sit in this room with anyone else.”
I thought there could be nothing in the world more wonderful than loving someone and wanting to share that adoration. I knew Amrita would love Finch because I loved Finch, and I knew Finch would love Amrita because a rock would have loved Amrita if I could have made it animate.
That night, in the bed beside Amrita’s with the lights shut off and her slow breathing the only sound left, I’d said, “Wanna meet my work friend?”
Now it felt like such a spoiled pleasure to sit with Finch, to know her mannerisms and moods, to anticipate all the quiet moments where she’d take the opportunity to prod at me. She pulled her knees up to her chest and propped her boots on the edge of her seat as I took the chair next to her. I could feel her eyes burning against the side of my head.
“What do you think about all of this?” she asked finally, resting her cheek against a fist propped on the armrest. She spun slowly, back and forth, back and forth. “You know, Solo and Moody and Kolesnik and everything.”
I shrugged. “I mean, I don’t know. It will take a bit to get into the swing of things, but we’ll figure it out. I think talking with Moody will help me shape up the direction of my thesis.”
She nodded, but I could tell by her slight frown that she had something else on her mind.
“How are you and Caroline?” I said before she could ask me anything else, pretending to be fascinated by the spreadsheet of returns.
Finch hesitated. “What do you mean?”
“We all know the two of you are at the top of Moody’s list for Solo. She raved about your work in Junior Survey, and she chose you as her first one-on-one of the year.”
“Speculation.”
“Don’t be humble, it’s the truth. And ... I know that Caroline can be competitive if she feels threatened.”
Finch frowned. “She has no reason to feel threatened. She’s good, I’m good, we’re all good or we wouldn’t be here in the first place. Caroline just can’t bear to have her ego bruised. If she spent more time painting and less time worrying about the whims of Moody’s Solo list, she might be able to chill out. Besides, with the amount of money the Asters funnel into Rotham, there’s no way she won’t Solo. It would be a fuckin’ crime.”
“Rotham wouldn’t be that sleazy,” I stressed. “You’re both incredible. They’ll have to choose on merit, or the rest of us will riot.”
“Stop discounting yourself.” Finch turned back to her computer. “Besides, whoever Solos can expect a riot regardless. I have a feeling that none of us will go down without a fight.”
“True,” I said. “But Caroline—”
“We’re fine, Jo. Don’t cause problems where there aren’t any.”
The scolding hushed me. We worked the rest of the evening in near silence. A few people stopped by to borrow equipment: a boom mic, a camcorder, a cable for connecting a portable hard drive to the computer. But most of the evening passed with my glazed-over eyes lingering on the screen, my mind drifting far from work and landing in the anxiety that was becoming commonplace. What the hell was I trying to accomplish with my paintings? How could I ever beat out anyone else when they were all so inventive, when Finch and Caroline could create something masterful in the time it took me to drum up my most futile ideas? Why did I think my art was anything more important than the others—let alone significant enough to be shown as a Soloist? And how did I ever think I could reach that accolade if I couldn’t even be proud of what I was making?
The thump of a cardboard box on the desk shook me back into my body. I looked up from the computer into Finch’s face with guilty urgency, like she’d caught me in the middle of a spiral.
“It’s almost ten; we can lock up in a few. Also, I sorted through that box of materials someone donated and set these aside,” she said, tapping the lid of a box with her blunt nails. “Thought you and Sazzy might like them.”
I stared at the box, someone’s blocky handwriting spelling out FREE on the side in black marker. Finch reached out and squeezed my fingers, and the pen I was holding clattered to the table. I hadn’t realized that I’d been fidgeting until she stopped me. “You sure you’re alright?” she asked. “You seem like you’re really on edge.”
“Just tired,” I said, and most of me meant it. The rest of me would figure it out.
She nodded and started to shut down the computers as I gathered the box in my arms. Inside was a stack of a few books. I pushed them around and peered at the titles: a Wassily Kandinsky catalog, a few copies of Artforum , and a book called Ninth Street Women . Beneath them was a massive tome with a rough, leathery cover and an embossed word stamped into the material that read ANTHROPOMANCY . I dragged a thumb over the letters, feeling their ridges and valleys, and gave Finch a smile before shutting the flaps of the box.
“Cool?” she asked, her eyes soft.
“Cool,” I said. “Thanks.”