Two Names — Chapter 1

I have painted nine versions of him and none of them is honest. I will paint one more.

The tenth canvas is on the easel, blank. It is Sunday, the third week of March, and the light through the north-facing windows of Building 3 is the pale, even grey that the second-years call "money light" because it does not lie. Everything else lies. The cherry trees outside the studio building have begun to shed. Petals collect in the corners of the window frames like small, brief snow.

I should be home. Everyone else is. It is just past eleven in the morning and the corridor outside my door is empty in the particular way that Sundays are empty at Geidai — not abandoned, but deliberately cleared, as if the building itself has exhaled and decided not to perform. I can hear, very faintly, the sound of a bus pulling away from the stop on the other side of the courtyard. I can hear my own hands. I can hear, or imagine, the sound of Kanade's hands tapping a rhythm against whatever surface is nearest to him, because that is what he does when he is waiting.

He has been waiting since Friday. I have not answered my phone.

Let me be precise about what I mean when I say the light is grey. I mean that it comes from everywhere and nowhere, that it falls without direction, that it does not make shadows so much as it makes the absence of shadows — a light that asks you to look at the thing itself and not at the drama of it. It is the light I have been trying to paint for three years. I have not come close.

I am standing in front of the blank canvas. The brushes are in the jar. The palette is clean. I wiped it last night at eleven-thirty, after I realized I had been standing in front of the ninth version for twenty minutes without touching it, without stepping back, without doing the thing that would tell me whether it was working or not.

It was not working. I knew that before I stepped back. I stepped back anyway, as if the distance might change something, as if geometry could solve the problem.

It did not.

Nine versions. Let me say that again so it arrives properly: I have painted the same person nine times and none of the paintings is honest. Not in the way I mean. Technically, some of them are fine. One or two are better than fine — they are the kind of paintings that professors point to when they are making a point about brushwork, about the relationship between tone and hue, about economy of form. They are paintings that would hold their own in any group show in the country. They are, in every way that matters to a panel, excellent.

They are also lies.

I will try to explain what I mean by that. I have been trying to explain it to myself for most of the semester, in the dark, in the mornings before anyone else arrives, in the long silences between the end of a critique and the moment I walk back to my studio and close the door.

The ninth version is still on the drying rack. I can see it from where I am standing — a figure, half-length, face turned slightly toward the left edge of the canvas. The skin tone is accurate. The proportions are correct. The paint is mixed with the exact ratio of titanium white to cadmium yellow that I have spent three years calibrating until I can replicate it without thinking, without tasting it on the back of my brush, without doing any of the things that actual painters — the ones whose work I admire, the ones whose names I cannot say out loud without feeling something close to grief — apparently do.

The figure in the painting is a person I have known for fourteen years. His name is Kanade. We met when we were thirteen, in a piano practice room because our mothers were friends and we were both too young to have a choice. He was already composing then. I was already trying to copy the things he played. I did not know that what I was doing was painting. I thought I was just paying attention.

I am still paying attention. That is the problem.

Here is what happened with the ninth version: I finished it on Thursday evening. I mixed the final color — the shadow under the right eye, the particular shade that is not quite bruise and not quite warmth, the color that tells you something is happening beneath the surface — and I stepped back and I looked and I felt, for a moment, the thing I have been chasing since April. The moment when the painting becomes more real than the person. The moment when the canvas is no longer a record of observation but a thing in itself, complete, requiring nothing, wanting nothing, simply being what it is.

It lasted four seconds. Then I saw the hands.

The hands were wrong. Not wrong in the way that the first version's hands were wrong — too large, the fingers thickened in a way that would have been fine if it were intentional and was not — but wrong in a subtler way. The hands were correct. They were proportioned accurately, they were positioned plausibly, they were rendered with the same technical precision as everything else in the painting. And they were the hands of a stranger.

Kanade's hands do not look like that. His hands are narrow, the fingers long, the knuckles prominent in a way that makes them look like they belong to a larger frame. When he plays piano — which he does, still, despite everything his family has said about it — his hands move the way water moves: with complete authority and no excess. The hands in my painting were good hands. They were not his hands. There is a difference.

I looked at the hands for a long time. Then I looked at the face. Then I looked at the face again.

The face was correct too. The proportions were right. The eyes — I spent four hours on the eyes — were exactly the color I see when I look at him in the late afternoon light in the Central Cafeteria, which is when I have been looking at him most often, because that is when he is most himself: tired, hungry, the edges softened by a day of not quite saying what he means.

The eyes in the painting were accurate. The painting was lying.

I understand, in theory, why this is happening. I understand it the way I understand that I should eat breakfast, or call my mother on Sundays, or submit my preliminary portfolio before the deadline instead of the night before. I understand it intellectually. The intellectual understanding is not the problem.

The problem is that I cannot get close enough to the thing I am trying to paint to see it clearly. This is not a metaphor. It is a spatial fact. If I step back far enough to see the painting as a composition, I lose the person. If I step close enough to see the person, I lose the painting. I have been standing in this impossible distance for nine months, making accurate, careful, complete lies.

The professor said this to me two weeks ago. She said: Kiryu, this is technically excellent. You have a real gift for form. But I want to ask you something, and I need you to think about it honestly. What are you afraid of?

She meant it as a genuine question. She is that kind of teacher — the kind who believes that the answer to a technical problem is a psychological one, that a painting fails because the painter is failing something, that every formal weakness is a moral one in disguise. I used to think this was pretentious. I am no longer sure she is wrong.

I said: I'm not sure I understand the question.

She smiled. She has been teaching at Geidai for twenty years. She has seen every version of every evasion. She knows what I'm not sure I understand means. She did not call me on it. She said: Take your time. The show is in February. You have time.

She was right that I have time. She was wrong about what the time is for.

I have been thinking about her question in the dark, in the mornings, in the silences. What am I afraid of? I am afraid of the answer to that question. I am afraid that the answer is the thing I have been painting — the thing I cannot name, the thing that sits in the space between me and Kanade, the thing that has been there since we were thirteen and will not leave now that we are twenty-one and the distance between us is measured not in years but in the number of things I have not said and he has not asked.

I am afraid that if I paint it honestly, the painting will be about that. And if the painting is about that, then the painting is a confession. And if the painting is a confession, then I have said the thing I have not said without saying it, which is a kind of cowardice and also a kind of bravery and I do not know which one I am capable of and I do not know which one would be worse.

I am afraid that the painting will change things. I am afraid it will not.

The blank canvas is still blank. It has been blank for forty minutes. I have been standing here for forty minutes, looking at the tenth surface, thinking about the ninth, the eighth, the seventh. Nine months. Nine lies. Nine technically excellent, emotionally absent, formally coherent paintings of a person I have known for fourteen years, and not one of them is honest.

Tomorrow I will start again. Tomorrow the light will be different. Tomorrow Kanade will text me and I will answer and we will have a conversation that is exactly the same as every other conversation we have had, which is to say it will be careful, and warm, and it will not touch the thing beneath it, and I will go back to my studio and I will stand in front of the canvas and I will not paint it.

Today, for the first time, I am thinking: what if I do not step back?

The cherry blossoms outside are still falling. The bus has gone. The corridor is empty. My hands are stained with white and I have not cleaned them properly and there is a smudge of cadmium red on my left wrist that I do not remember getting.

I am going to paint one more version. I do not know if I can make it honest. I do not know if honest is something I am capable of, or if I have spent so long being technically excellent that I have forgotten the thing beneath the technique, the thing that makes a painting more than a record, the thing that makes it true.

I am going to try.

That is the first honest thing I have said in nine months. I am standing in my studio on a Sunday in March, and I am going to try.

The canvas is waiting. The brushes are clean. The light is grey and even and asking me to look at the thing itself.

I pick up a brush.

The bristles are hog hair, mid-weight, a size six. I have used the same brand since my second year. They are reliable in the way that I am reliable: technically sound, not exceptional, unlikely to surprise you. I dip the tip into the cadmium red — not the tube straight, I dilute it first, always, I learned that from a YouTube video made by a painter in Kyoto who I will never meet and whose work I have studied until the edges of it are worn smooth in my mind. The red thins at the edges as it meets the oil. It is the color of something that is about to happen.

I do not paint the face. Not yet. I paint the background first — always, every time — because the background is where the painting lives, and if the background is wrong, everything on top of it is compensating. The grey of the wall behind him. The faint line where the wall meets what might be a window or might be nothing, I have never decided, in nine versions, whether there is a window or not. In some versions there is light coming from the left. In others the room is closed, sealed, a space with no outside. The inconsistency would bother me if I thought about it. I do not think about it. I am thinking about the red.

The red goes on the background. Not as a block — I am not that kind of painter — but as a breath, a suggestion, a warmth just beneath the surface of the grey. It says: something is happening here. It says: this room is not empty. It says: there is a person in this painting and the person is not still.

I do not know if that is true. I do not know if the person in the painting is still. I do not know what it would mean for a painting to be still versus moving. These are the questions I am supposed to answer by painting, not by thinking, and I am doing neither correctly.

The red dries faster than I expect. I add a second layer. A third. The brushwork is loose in a way that my brushwork has not been loose in months — I am not thinking about the technique, I am not thinking about the ratio, I am just putting the color where it wants to go, which is a thing I used to do before I learned how to do it properly, and which I have not done since.

It feels like falling. It feels like the moment before falling, the half-second when you know the ground is coming and you have not yet decided whether to step or to let go.

I let go.

The phone buzzes in my pocket. I do not look at it. The phone buzzes again. I do not look at it. The phone buzzes a third time and this time there is a pattern to it — short, short, long — which is how Kanade texts when he is impatient, which is how he texts when he has been waiting and the waiting has become a thing with edges, a thing that can cut.

I look at the canvas. The red is drying. The background is warm. The figure is not yet a figure. It is a possibility. It is the space where a person might be.

I put the brush down.