A Boat Against the Shoreline (Oil on Canvas), J.T. Cunningham

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.”

“But you have to admit,” I said, rubbing my wrist as if he actually hit it. “My stuff doesn’t fall into the baroque tradition.”

“And?” He raised an eyebrow. “Impressionism isn’t about the fine details.” “And?” The eyebrow rose higher. “That’s the movement my stuff more closely resembles?”

“Damn it, have I taught you nothing?” Van de Berg spat, hands now resting on his girthy hips. “No classification! No categorization!”

“We have those for a reason,” I pointed out. “To avoid situations like this entirely.”

“Nonsense,” he muttered, hands now folding into each other via his arms.

I knew to convince him of seeing things my way bordered on impossible; he railed against the art history program every year, sending in petition after petition to have it liquidated into the history department, right up until his retirement two years after I graduated. Art history, he told me, amounted to nothing more than an excuse for the bourgeoises to look down their noses at “low art.” When I asked him what that qualified as, he refused to answer. Which meant he knew the paradox in his argument, and he indeed classified art between high and low forms—which meant qualification and categorization—which meant he was definitely a hypocrite. In his mind, I’m sure, he had worked through the mental gymnastics enough times to render the nonsensical as nothing more than painfully obvious.

When I stare at my canvas now, I think about him and his rigid regulations for “good” art. I think about his refusal to admit defeat or accept concession and my penchant to do the opposite. Perhaps because of this, we learned a great deal from each other, even if I was the only one to understand this.

Primarily, we vehemently disagreed on the fundamental nature of art. See, to me, art is an expression—an expression of self—of one’s psychology and philosophy and structures of belief. Art is not only one thing, nor one medium, nor even necessarily visual. It expands upon all things, a spectator of the human consciousness on our external reality.

To Van de Berg, art was exercise. Mental and physical. Sketching and drawing, therefore, were vital steps to the act of creating. No spontaneity— none of that Caravaggio carving-right-on-the-canvas shit. It must be laborious just as it must be all-consuming. His marriages, as you can imagine, fell prey to an eternal war of the passion of art versus the love of people that, to a degree, all serious artists have.

“You don’t need love to survive as a painter,” he once told me. “Just absinthe and yellow paint chips,” I said. “You think I’m joking.”

“Even Van Gogh admitted love was a necessary component to living a full life,” I pointed out. “I imagine him alive, and all I feel is his loneliness.”

“It made him a better painter. Imagine if he hadn’t felt all of that. Would he have produced the works that he did?”

“Velázquez had a fairly stable personal life,” I said.

“And what do people admire him for?” Van de Berg muttered. “Ridiculous portraiture.”

Van de Berg, though gifted to the nth degree with plenty of acclaim for his works, got himself blacklisted from the artistic community en masse for such blasphemy. “A Philistine and a heretic,” one fellow art professor called him in a paper just for the sin of thinking that Las Meninas was nothing more than a vanity project with no real worth, artistic or otherwise.

“It says nothing, as it always has, and will continue to do so until the end of time,” he was quoted as saying in a book on seventeenth-century Spanish art. “What about the dwarfs? What about them?”

When the author pointed out that there was a dwarf in Las Meninas, Van de Berg responded, “In, yes, but not the focus. That arrogant son-of-a-bitch is. Him and that mustache.”

Nevertheless, I never faulted him for it. I never much cared for baroque art in the first place and, so, had little to no opinion on the matter. Van de Berg, for all his flaws, was sincere. Though rigid, he was unpretentious. His love of art stemmed from a belief that art conveyed emotions and stories that were inert in other mediums, not because he wanted to impress anyone. If

anything, I like to think that he would’ve hung up the smock if he received any attention that wasn’t tinged with contempt.

Meanwhile, I desperately craved it. Not from Van de Berg, since I knew I’d never get it, but from my fellow students. All of whom were fairly unimpressed. Nonplussed. “It’s all right, I guess.” “Yeah, it’s fine.” “Sure, I like it.” I never received a word of acclaim from them during my undergraduate years, nor did any of my paintings make it into the student magazine. Some of my fellow art undergrads got their works hung up in lobbies and the library. Eventually, some got into galleries; mine typically ended up at the bottom of trash cans.

For a time, I tried following Van de Berg’s examples in their concrete rationality, their narrow concentration on the fine details. I even tried a version of the painting where I did exactly as he told me to do. But I couldn’t. It wasn’t me. And as much as we disagreed on the subject, I knew that betraying my own ideas for the sake of approval would be far worse a disappointment for him than my continued insolence.

Needless to say, I’m not a professional. Almost none of my fellow undergrads are either, save for a few who wised up and started making weird installation art that still doesn’t make sense to me. In his last email to me, Van de Berg bemoaned the state-of-the-art world as a “barren wasteland disguised as intellectual curiosity.” I have to laugh because, to Van de Berg, every art movement, even the ones he subconsciously emulated, could be described as such.

Weirdly enough, as I’ve been told by other people who knew him, I was one of his favorite students. Over his fifty-odd years as an art instructor, Van de Berg fell into a cycle about every five years or so; he’d sniff out talent and try his best to nurture it before said talent inevitably floundered because of excessively lofty ambition, or lack of dedication, or some other excuse he conjured up to avoid wasting any more emotional effort on them. Then they’d be cut loose, nothing more than ripped pages of a sketchbook in the wind, and he’d turn to what he hoped would be the genuine article. As you can imagine, he never found it.

But being one of his “favorites,” so to speak, meant he didn’t blame me for my lack of professional success. Sometimes he boiled it down to, as he put it, “plain bad luck,” and with those students, he kept in periodic contact—an email here and there about a new gallery showing or an exhibit at a museum. It was nothing personal, nothing warm or friendly, but just to be on his mailing list meant you managed not to disappoint him. With him, that had to be enough.

Long after our correspondence faded into the impersonal and perfunctory, I decided to replicate the painting I did with him that one day—the one with too much purple. It’s not the original, because I ruined that one by fine-tuning the lines to emulate someone else’s style. Instead, this one is mine and mine alone, including all of the excess purple.

It’s just a seascape, but with a beach and a bluff and a boat. I didn’t understand the point of the boat until, I think, halfway through painting it. It’s merely a component, one that isn’t even essential to the final piece. But it doesn’t have to be anything, essential or otherwise. It just has to be present. Present and full of a vigor that you wish everybody else had. And I think that’s why he put up with me. We both had it, even when everybody else told us we shouldn’t. In the end, it really is just a boat. But to us, that’s all it has to be.