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THE STARK LINES AND endless grey tones of downtown Seattle usually led Ryan Ikeda to mentally paint the streets in ink strokes, but a glorious early-September sun gilded buildings with heavenly light straight out of Caravaggio. The painting in Ryan’s head reformed, oils instead of ink, rendering a chiaroscuro vision of the city.
Ryan followed his long-time friend, Veronica Black, on the next leg of their art supply excursion.
“Thirty-Six Views of the Streets of Seattle? Is it finished? We need to find you a gallery for it.” She sped on, not waiting for his answer. Crossing Olive Way, Veronica glanced back over her shoulder, briefly lit golden like a painting of a medieval saint in the afternoon sunlight that streamed between buildings.
“Why do you insist on calling it that, Vee?” Ryan hurried to catch up as Veronica rounded the corner on to Eighth Avenue, shadowed again as the tall downtown buildings blocked the sunshine. “It’ll be done when it’s done. My skills aren’t there yet.”
“You’ve been doing this for ten years.” That they’d been friends since art school made her inability to understand that work like his needed patience more frustrating.
“And I’m still not a master at sumi-e brushwork. Maybe I never will be without studying in Japan.”
“So do that.” Veronica’s casual reply negated the impossible expense, time, and effort of a trip like that.
“It’s too late for that. I don’t want to leave Ben and even if I did, how could I afford it?” He opened the door and ushered Veronica into the hazy, grey air of Seattle Art Supply, the popularity of the shop at odds with its unused, uninhabited appearance. The door clanged shut behind them.
At the register, the cashier glanced up, his face crumpling into a scowl. “Spray paint is behind the counter now. You taggers stole too much of it.”
“Do I look like a vandal?” Ryan had cut his skater bangs years ago in favor of shorter, spikier hair. That day’s Converse, black jeans, black t-shirt, and a decade-old army jacket from his skate punk days—that is, the same delinquent style half the artists in Seattle wore. Not a criminal ensemble to be called out in a store catering to artists.
“Do we look like vandals?” Veronica folded her arms, mouth twisted in disgust at the counter guy’s assertion.
“That shirt does make you look criminal,” Ryan said. Convinced that Veronica wore her recent affectation, orange-and-blue Hawaiian shirt intentionally every time they got together, he couldn’t resist teasing her about it.
“This is a good shirt!” She wore it unbuttoned over a t-shirt, with jean shorts over black tights, and Doc Martens, a slightly disheveled, absent-minded artist appearance—likely whatever she found on the floor and pulled on before leaving the house. That day, her tousled short hair added to the image, as if she ran her hands through it repeatedly while working on the next issue of her graphic novel, Red Flag.
The counter guy shook out his newspaper and folded it but didn’t put it down. “We get a lot of your type in here. I don’t know who’s doing what.”
Ryan hitched his backpack higher on his shoulder. “Our type? You get a lot of artists in your art supply store?”
The guy shrugged. With the corner of his newspaper, he pointed to Veronica’s t-shirt, which featured the cover of Red Flag Number One, with the pirate queen Ching Shih holding a sword to the neck of a kneeling British Navy captain.
“You know, the girl who draws that comic lives here in Seattle.”
“This girl,” Ryan said, “the one you implied came here to steal from you, is the girl who draws that comic.” He didn’t usually bother with bullshit assumptions people made about him, but the clerk explaining Red Flag to Veronica went beyond dumb judgments about their clothes.
In Red Flag, Veronica had found a Chinese story and rendered it as nineteenth century classic adventure tales, with Madame Ching as a feminist hero that spoke to who Veronica was as a fifth-generation American. Ryan wanted that balance and satisfaction with his own art, but it still eluded him. He envisioned his current project with a secret hope that would be the deeply personal art he admired, displaying his heritage through his perfect Japanese brushwork, and his present self with images of the city his family had called home for four generations.
“Dude, you’re Veronica Black? I had no idea. I’m a huge fan. I wish I had an issue here for you to sign.” The cashier glanced over the counter like he might have brought an issue and forgotten about it.
Veronica’s dubious expression could ignite kindling. “Not afraid I’d steal that too?”
Ryan loved Veronica’s biting responses—when they weren’t directed at him.
The cashier raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Aw man, you guys know how it is. The kind of people that come in here—”
“Yes, artists like us. Do you want to hold my backpack while we shop?” Ryan held out his bag.
“Nah, you’re cool. You’re with her. Are you her brother?”
Ignoring the ignorant question, Ryan steered Veronica into the store, before the aggression coming off her in waves did irreparable harm to the jerky cashier.
Veronica laughed as they waded into the deep dust-mote corners of the store. “What were you saying before we walked into that pile of pig shit?”
“That I’m not going to drop everything and study in Japan.”
They passed the rows of blank canvasses, heading to the pens along the back wall, around the L-bend of the store. “C’mon, little brother, make your dreams happen, whatever it takes. Why are you holding yourself back?”
Ryan ignored the dig, but failed to hide that she got under his skin. “‘Little brother’? I’m older and taller than you.” Catching up, he loomed over her.
She cracked an impish smile. “Didn’t you hear the man? And you’re annoying like a pesty brother.”
Veronica stopped at the re-purposed magazine rack full of blank sketchbooks. Her gaze locked with Ryan’s for a moment before she turned her attention to the various kinds of spiral-bound paper. “You need to think about finishing and showing your Thirty-Six Views. When you spend too much time on something, you get insecure about art and barf those emotions all over your life. You’ve been doing it since you and I were together. For fuck’s sake, we’re thirty now. Get over your childish insecurities.”
When he first met Veronica in art school, twelve years ago, Ryan mistook the intense magnetism that drew them together as romantic attraction, but it proved to be a deeper connection. Yet not so deep that he didn’t get irritated when she attributed his actions to emotional problems she believed he’d had since he was eighteen.
“I’m not insecure. I don’t barf emotions. I’m usually accused of being too stoic.” Ryan tugged his army jacket closed and folded his arms.
“Right. Keep bottling up all that shit until it explodes like a shaken beer.” She selected two sketchbooks and continued to the pen wall, her Doc Martens squeaking slightly on the dingy linoleum floor.
Ryan stayed put, watching her walk away. Annoyed by anyone acting like they knew his mind better than he did, Veronica’s accuracy amplified his irritation.
“Hey, little sister,” he called after her. “If you know so much about my problem, why don’t you tell me how to fix it.”
Her laughter rang in the quiet store. The guy at the counter rattled his newspaper. At the pen wall, Veronica uncapped and drew on the test pad, half a dozen alternate pen possibilities clutched in her hand. They’d done this together a hundred times in the last dozen years.
Veronica held up her picture of two overlapping circles. Inside the overlap read Art; the rest of the left circle said Unlimited Narcissism; the right, Paralyzing Self-doubt.
She tapped the Narcissism side. “You do better work when you’re over here, even if it makes you unbearable to others.” She pointed to the Doubt side. “But now, you’re stuck here. Which makes you even more unbearable. You’re not an idiot who believes success will rob you of artistic integrity. So why aren’t you pursuing it?”
“I’m taking the time to perfect my work before I show it. When I don’t doubt its quality, I’ll know I’m ready.”
The back of Veronica’s head offered no judgment, but her sigh did. “You are always at your best now. Will you be better tomorrow? Maybe, but we aren’t there yet. You need to be showing now. I did it and look what it got me. You can too.” The contract for Red Flag hadn’t made Veronica rich, but her recognition and reputation were unquestionable.
The bell on the shop door clanged. Distance muffled the conversation but not the cashier’s tone of friendly welcome. So different from what Ryan and Veronica received.
“I should get brushes while we’re here.” Ryan escaped to the adjacent wall instead of suffering through more criticism for how he mismanaged his career.
Seattle Art Supply’s selection of traditional Japanese brushes, better than most other art stores, still wasn’t much. Ryan took two of each style, then checked the oil painting brushes to supplement his current stash.
“Why are you getting oil brushes? Starting something new?”
Flinching, Ryan's hand twitched, his brushes clattering to the floor. Veronica, right by his ear, snuck up on him intentionally. No squeaking Doc Martens. And she called him pesty.
“I’m all for new work,” she said, “but finish Thirty-Six Views of Seattle. You can sell them. Any good gallery will take them. Selling at fire-sale prices to family and friends, like you’ve been doing, won’t get you where you want to be.”
More than anything, Ryan wanted a show at a good gallery—the baseline for any decent artist. But a decade ago, his Asian Art Studies professor, Robert Langdon, rejected Ryan’s inclusion in a show at his wife’s gallery. He insisted that Ryan would embarrass himself by showing before he was ready. He never shared that humiliation with Veronica, which left her with incorrect opinions about his reluctance. Ten years later, the criteria that proved Ryan a master of his art remained unmet.
“‘Paralyzed with self-doubt’ is too mild a description for you,” she said.
“Let’s go see what loose paper they have today.” Ryan gathered his brushes and steered her toward the paper, away from advice about his career.
A new voice locked Ryan’s spine. “Vee-to-the-ronica! And my-oh-Ry! What up, yo.”
Ryan plastered a smile on his face, worrying what might have been overheard. “Eli.” Ryan didn’t get a chance to draw a breath before Eli clamped him in a too-tight hug. Veronica got the same treatment.
Though it didn’t at all suit his chiseled jaw and pretty-boy face, Eli wore his hair in a faux-grunge rocker style, with matching three-day stubble. Appropriate, since Eli considered himself the Eddie Vedder of the Seattle art scene. A faint tan from a recent vacation in sunnier places than Seattle had replaced the milky-white paleness Eli cultivated back in art school.
“Hey, Eli.” Veronica, instead of forcing a smile, gave Eli the neutral expression that people often mistook for anger but was simply her face at rest. In this case, she wasn’t any happier to see Eli than Ryan was.
“Man, you guys. You know it’s Elijah now. For my friends, anyway. Put out new works, gotta keep the professional name for that, right?” He offered them glossy, thick postcards.
Elías Fuentes
New works in the key of memory
At Spielhaus
6 September through 8 October 1997
Text over a linocut, printed in striped rainbow ink, of two romantically entwined, crown-wearing men. A familiar image, but from where?
Eli once told Ryan he chose his artistic pseudonym as a tribute to Diego Rivera. Ryan called it an insult to that exceptional artist. Fucking Elijah Wells wasn’t Hispanic. Nor Filipino. Not anything as far as Ryan knew, except a great white usurper of other people’s art and culture.
“You guys gots to come to my opening tomorrow! It’s gonna be the bomb-diggity! Kevin got these amazing caterers and, like, everyone is coming. Love to see you there.”
“I don’t know if I—”
Eli squeezed Ryan’s shoulder, a gesture he had long believed to be reassuring when he saw Ryan faltering. “Just make it, Ry. You can do that for me. Bring Ben. You’re still with Ben Ladner, right? Man, miss you guys. The old days, huh? Yeah, come down, we’ll catch up for sure. You too, Vee.”
“Sure, we’ll come.”
Ryan wanted to kick Veronica for accepting.
“My-o-Ry, you have to come so we can talk, man. I’m putting together this group show, an invitational, you know? Late winter at Prima Zero. It’s called Exposed!, since the theme is ‘exposing yourself.’ Cheeky, right? Not like porn, but ten artists showing highly personal works. I got one space left. Come be my number ten.” He grinned. “I’d say be my number one, but that’s Kevin, now, right? But we had a time back in the day.” He waggled his eyebrows in the world’s poorest Groucho Marx imitation.
“Cool. Ryan has the perfect project for that right now.”
Forget kicking, Veronica deserved a far worse punishment for entangling him like this. No force in the world was strong enough to make Ryan do a joint show with Eli Fucking Wells. Unless the entire future of his career as an artist hung on it. Fuck.
“Way cool! You don’t have to submit the application for review, dude. I know your work is tight. Man, you taught me half the stuff I know. Yeah, we’ll hammer details tomorrow night. Gonna be so good to work with you again.”
“No, I—”
“It’s coolio, bro. I’m good on my word. You’re in for sure. I gotta go, got tons of these to drop off.” Eli waved the postcards at them and hugged them both too tightly again before disappearing out the door.
“I can’t believe you signed me up for that, Vee. Fuck. Hope he’s completely forgotten it by tomorrow.”
“I can’t believe you dated him, little brother.” Veronica shook her head, incredulous for either his past or the current whirlwind of Eli’s posturing bullshit.
“I dated you too.” Ryan examined watercolor brushes. Even all these years later, he believed—and resented—that Eli dated him only for the artiste’s cachet of having an “exotic” boyfriend.
She snorted, but Ryan sensed the good humor. “Yeah, for like six months. You were with Eli three times as long as that. How did you stand him?”
“I was young and dumb.” Ryan joked, but truthfully it took him too long to see how Eli wasn’t good for him.
“And full of—”
“Don’t you dare.” Laughter bubbled up at the tacky joke, the ridiculousness of this supply trip, from the oblivious clerk to the disruption of Eli’s arrival.
“I still don’t get it. But then, you’re always kind and generous to a fault.”
How were those qualities a fault? They were what Ryan most admired in his boyfriend Ben.
Ryan examined Eli’s postcard. He held it up to Veronica. “Is that a Mapplethorpe? Or a badly traced, reversed linocut of one?”
She snatched the card from his hands. “Oh, my god.”
Ryan’s kindness faltered in the face of the things that bothered him most about Eli. “Why did ‘Elías’ even go to Cornish if he wanted to make this crap? Mail-order art school from the back of a comic would have served him fine. Hell, Eli didn’t even need that if he’s only going to copy stuff. We learned to copy in junior high art class. And people buy this shit.”
“Your work will look spectacular next to his.”
“I can’t do a show with Eli, Vee.”
When he was nineteen, Eli was a superlative water-colorist and ceramicist, and he did woodcut work at master level. His linocut skills were unquestionable, though his subject matter always left something to be desired. His current choice of images, to copy others, only highlighted that he’d given up his other talents in favor of what would make the most money. The art world lost out, because Eli didn’t practice his other talents.
“Why not? This show is exactly what you need.”
Ryan waved the Mapplethorpe rip-off postcard at her.
She shrugged. “Everything is derivative. You didn’t invent sumi-e. You learned it by studying others.”
“That isn’t the same at all.”
“Still, his show would be good for you. You need to dive in, Ry.”
“I’m not ready.”
“What’s to be ready for? Go and do it.” Veronica headed to the cash register with her stack of notebooks and pens.
Dazed, Ryan followed. Showing at Prima Zero was starting at the top. Did he have anything worthy of inclusion?
“You gonna be in his Exposed! show?” The cashier waved at the stack of Eli’s postcards on the counter. “I heard it’s only high-level artists.” His wry face challenged Ryan to prove his place.
“He’s going to blow everyone away,” Veronica said. “First by paying for his brushes instead of stealing them, then with his art.”
To succeed, Ryan needed to find a fast way back to the Unlimited Narcissism side of Veronica’s Venn diagram.