22
A BOAT AGAINST THE SHORELINE (OIL ON CANVAS) J.T. Cunningham
“See what you’re doing here?” he pointed with a hairy finger at what was then my most recent painting. “Using too much purple,” I said. He glared at me behind his thick brown horn-rims; had this been even forty years earlier, he would’ve smacked me good across the back of the head. Van de Berg was a traditionalist, a puritan in all aspects of life, save for the three marriages that cost him a good deal of money on account of the divorce proceedings. He’d argue that this deviation from his typical misery expenditures was out of his control, but his ex-wives would probably say otherwise. “I understand what you’re going for in terms of scope,” he told me. “But a seascape is not composed of a seascape. There are beaches and bluffs and boats. What do you have here, then?” He enjoyed offering hypotheticals that weren’t truly hypothetical, but rather a poor man’s attempt at a parable. Often, I thought about asking him if he even knew what a rhetorical question was, but the singular instance where I corrected him on his definition of aphorism, he wouldn’t let me paint on canvas for a week to teach me something about my “intellectual snobbery” and how far removed real art was from it. “Yeah,” I said. “‘Yeah’ is not an answer to the question I posed.” “It’s an idea, not an execution,” I murmured. “Precisely,” he nodded. “Maybe our styles just emulate completely different moveme—” “No,” he snapped, those serpentine eyes telling me he was itching to whack my wrist with a switch. “No such thing. Art is art. Classifying oneself as belonging to one particular school only limits you.”
