How to Be Brave(20)

“No, really, though. Those *s really do appreciate art.” Time for one of Marquez’s cynical, curse-laden tangents against the government and all things authoritative. It’s amazing we ever get anything done. “They put me here, an art class in the basement, where there’s no natural light for a budding artist to actually see what they’re doing, where we’re inundated by fumes from the chem lab next door. I swear, they’re trying to asphyxiate me.” Marquez points at the door. “If the lack of state funding doesn’t kill me, Zittel will.” This provokes more chuckles from the amused crowd. Marquez shakes his head and laughs. “But seriously, folks. I do like this assignment. It’s a doozy. I’m sure you’re going to love it too.”

He hands out the guidelines for the assignment: We have to research a twentieth-century artist—any twentieth-century artist—and then create five pieces of original art inspired by this artist’s work and write a seven-page essay to reflect on how the artist’s life and work influenced us.

I know immediately who I’m going to research.

Lee Mullican, twentieth-century painter.

Lee Mullican, my mom’s favorite artist.

Lee Mullican, her muse, her master, her own personal god.

My mom studied Lee Mullican as part of her doctorate that she was never able to finish, and she chose him as what she called her “primary focus of study and inspiration.” Mullican was a hard artist to study in Chicago since he worked in Los Angeles.

There are no Lee Mullicans at the Art Institute of Chicago. To my mom, this was the worst kind of travesty. He died the year I was born and is well-known in certain art circles, I guess, but he never achieved the kind of popularity that my mom thought he deserved. “He was a California artist living in a New York world, but history will speak to his brilliance, his artistry, his individual voice and beauty,” she’d say. My mom had been raised in L.A., and I wonder if part of her obsession with his art was his golden suns and love of all things Eastern and hippie. One winter when I was in the fourth grade and she was still working on her dissertation, we flew out to L.A. to see a show of his at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. We spent the mornings driving in and out of canyons, up and down boulevards, and alongside beaches and foothills with some of my dad’s family who lives out there, and then my mom would head to the museum to study the exhibit and work with curators in their library while my dad and I sat by the hotel pool and ordered milk shakes from the bar. She missed L.A., but she said she never wanted to move back. “It’s not a city. It’s just one massive, throbbing suburb,” she said. But I think she missed the colors, the lush gardens and luminous sunsets. “It’s still camouflaged as paradise, though,” she said, sighing as our plane took off over the ocean. She pressed her forehead against the window and waved a silent good-bye.

On the last day of our trip, she took us to the museum so we could see the exhibit. “You should see it, John,” she said. “The way he uses his knife to lift the paint. The movement and light. It’s extraordinary. You too, Georgia. Then, you’ll understand me.”

I wanted to understand her, so I took it seriously. I was only nine, but I walked slowly through the exhibit, examining each painting carefully, trying to see what my mom saw. Maybe I was just too young to have any major revelations, but I did recognize that her own art was clearly influenced by him, all shapes and form and color. She didn’t believe in representing real life in her professional work. She was good at it. I mean, she was constantly drawing what was right in front of her. It was kind of an obsession. Our apartment is still littered with tiny sketches of half-eaten apples on napkins and wilting daffodils on crumpled receipts and the mailman’s wrinkled face on ripped envelopes. But when it came down to putting oil on canvas, to finalizing her ideas as large permanent pieces, she preferred the abstract. She especially loved painting the female form, but it was always slightly unrecognizable, exaggerated, distorted. She was searching for ideas, she said—and she often quoted Mullican when she said it—for “ideas that went beyond what one saw, beyond form.” She was always worried about form.

I raise my hand. “When can we tell you who we want to write about?”

Marquez nods, impressed. “You know already?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Way to go, Miss Askeridis. Getting ahead of the bunch. Making up for lost time, making up for the”—he pauses to scan his attendance book—“count them, seven absences in eight weeks!”

Dude, why is he picking on me today? Sometimes his sarcasm is funny, and then suddenly, it’s not. It’s f*cking annoying, to say the least.

I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of a response, so I just flip the page of my sketchbook and start drawing some random lines. “Never mind,” I mumble.

“You can tell me after class,” Marquez says more seriously, retreating a bit on the satire. He seems to feel bad. Well, good, then. He should. I’m a good student. What does he care if I cut a few classes? It’s senior year. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do?

Marquez changes the subject by turning down the lights and pulling up a PowerPoint on value and proportion, and most everyone spaces out. Through the flashing light of the changing slides, I look over at Daniel, who’s taking notes.

Siiigh. He’s just so cute.