Chapter 17: The Eleventh Version

The problem was that Kanade was not here. This sounds obvious — of course Kanade was not here, Kanade was never here, Kanade had his own studio in the music building and his own schedule and his own life and the fact that I was painting him did not require his physical presence any more than the paintings I had made of people I had never met required them to sit for me. I had painted landscapes from photographs. I had painted figures from imagination. The absence of the subject was not, in itse...