Robert Kirkpatrick's stories are designed to be more or less stand-alone, so you don't need to have read any of the others to enjoy them, but they do form a loose narrative line. Feel free to read this one right off, or try Artist in the Park first.
These stories aren't romances, and they are hardly meant to be realistic. I aim for the plausibly ridiculous. Enjoy.
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Artist at the Arts Fair
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On Wednesday, I packed my van for that week's art show and headed out early. It was a long drive south. With fall settling in up in my part of the country, the remaining outdoor shows of the year were in cities where the weather was still reliably nice... usually. I packed sweaters just in case.
I left my current commission on its easel in my studio, an enormous, full-length nude of the client herself. I took one last look at it before leaving. Even after working on it for a least an hour most days for two weeks, it still daunted me how much detail remained to be fleshed out over 32 square feet of canvas. I shook my head in thought at Sophia.
Somehow, the process of the initial sitting for that portrait had led the two of us to hours upon hours of the hottest, sweatiest sex I could remember experiencing in a long time. Possibly the best I'd ever had. In the moment, I had been sure it was. Some combination of our kinks, some congealing of chemistry had driven us both wonderfully mad.
I shook my head at the memory and hit the road. It was a seven hour drive. I would not see or work on the nude again for about twelve days, as I had two consecutive shows near to each other down in that region, and was not about to drive all the way back home after the first week just to grab a change of underwear and turn right back around. Sophia had told me she was in Europe for a deal for the next month anyway, so I was not hurried.
I most sincerely hoped that she would want to fuck me again when I unveiled the finished work in her place in New York. I kind of expected that she would, honestly. That expectation was not any kind of entitlement on my part, just a simple, sublime projection.
There was no way on Earth that she and I would become a couple, though. Our lives, our worlds were different. I was in no mood to complicate my intentionally bachelor existence. I needed solitude most days, professionally and personally. I like people, but I am by nature a lone wolf. And I was dead-bone certain that Sophia had no interest or intention of letting a relationship or family impede her rise to power and success. Good for her.
I was equally confident, though, that if our sexual chemistry was as good for her as it was for me, we would find ways to be in the same city from time to time.
My van wobbled as I jerked it back into the lane from which I had drifted. I banished thoughts of Sophia (mostly) from my mind. Examining the curves of her body in my head was making for very distracted driving, and I had missed the curve in the road I was on! I concentrated on safety, speed enforcement avoidance, and the way the fall colors in the foliage faded back to green as I sped toward my destination.
I arrived far too late in the evening at my motel. I had been derailed at lunchtime by a lone, gnarled tree in of all places a McDonald's parking lot by an off-ramp. Its shape haunted me all through my Quarter Pounder, and I sat in my passenger seat with my small pad and compulsively sketched that tree. It was not a waste of time, I had realized as the piece took shape. It would be, when I had time to finish it, possibly at night in my various motel rooms over this trip, a beautifully quirky addition to my catalog. It was unlikely to be colorful enough to bother making lithographs of, but small matted prints of it would sell well to younger customers who needed something to stand out in their first apartment for 35 bucks, give or take.
*
The first morning of an outdoor show was always the worst. It began with the earliest of wakeups, a stop at Starbucks for an extra large coffee with oat milk and their little omelette bites, and then getting to the location early to set up my tent/pavilion so I could display my work. I have an unhealthy addiction to those egg bites. Unhealthy for my pocketbook.
This show was one of the better ones for set up, because my spot on the sidewalk overlooking the river was diagonally across from the space reserved for one Kylie Farrier. Kylie is a sculptor, and she and I exhibit at the same shows quite often. Luck of the draw had us neighbors this time. Given that proximity, by unspoken agreement, we helped each other erect our shelters for our booths. It made the work easier and faster for both of us.
I even had time to help her wrestle some of her taller pieces out of the stupidly large van she owns to transport her stuff. How her diminutive, five foot tall frame produces some of those soaring aluminum abstract works that are her signature is always beyond me.
As we toted one of her biggest down the short embankment from the parking lot and over to her space, Kylie looked behind her to negotiate a curb then watched out for me as I did the same. "So, Todd," she said slyly. "You always say you like the trip down this way. Girls prettier here than back home? I'll bet you have a sitting lined up in the evenings for one of those noodie pics you hang up in your Special Alcove we just erected."
"I very much hope so, Kylie. What time do you think you could be showered after we close up today?" I countered with a lightly leering smile.
"Ha!" my friend laughed. "No chance! Your work is like a photograph. Can you imagine, having every person who wanders through your booth and then comes over to mine, suddenly realizing when they see me that they know what I look like naked?" she scoffed back with a wink.
I looked at Kylie. At shows, she always wear what seems like sculptor's working clothes--a baggy pair of faded denim overalls with scorch marks and a big hole or two on the knees or legs, with a tattered old sleeveless white undershirt beneath. It was a costume, of course. I happened to know that she worked in a heavy cotton duck jumpsuit with full sleeves, and damned sure no holes to let through sparks. But it was an effective costume. She looked like a sculptor. She had none of the tattoos, piercings, or weirdly colored hair that many of her fellow avant gardeners sculptors, male or female, liked to rock, but her mousy brown hair was always cut and styled in some outrageous way. This year, she had gone for a shockingly spiked cut. I personally felt it ruined the studiedly disheveled look she was always going for, because that do so clearly required a lot of mousse, hairspray, and time. Still, it kinda rocked. Her petite bare arms displayed by the undershirt were small, but visibly muscled, and nicely so.
In other words, she was hot as a pistol, and I'd have killed to be able to do a nude of her.
"Yes, but on the bright side, all those people would... then turn around and... come back to... buy one," I grunted as I set down the weighted base of the... whatever this piece was supposed to be. "I'd sell a van full at every event," I joked, straightening up.
The two of us almost always bantered like this at some point when we saw each other. We had never hooked up, to my everlasting... mild regret. She had never given me any kind of clear signal that she was actually interested, and most of the time I wasn't either. Having sex with fellow artists on the same show circuit is always complicated. I have done it. I know.
"Well, if we did do it then, I'd have to get a cut of each sale," Kylie scoffed, and we turned back to the parking lot. I went in a slightly different direction to start bringing out my own stuff. The rest of Kylie's inventory were smaller pieces she needed no help with.
That was the first time Kylie had ever expressed an even joking opening to actually doing a nude sitting...
I started with my lithographs first, the large, super high quality reproductions of my best works. I had them produced in limited numbers. I seldom brought any originals to shows, though I would display the price for the original, if still available, on the tag beneath each litho. I'd bring the display bins of matted prints down later.
I tended to crate up the lithos four to a box for transport. I favored light frames so each was an easy haul. I had multiple copies of many, but the backups stayed in the truck to protect them from the elements. When I sold a piece or two, I'd run back and grab their replacements.
I'm a good artist with a good reputation, but this was a tightly juried show, so everybody there was a good artist with a good reputation. Sure, there were still artists like the lady five stalls down from me who sold flowers painted on bricks, but hers were actually quite beautiful flowers painted on bricks. My point is that I'm not good enough at the political side of the art show world to reliably be able to get an end booth every year, and this was a year I had not, so I had no outside wall space for extra display.
It did make hauling out enough pieces to fill my space easier.
My last crate, after the prints were out and set up, was the crate for the back alcove I always created with an inner wall--the alcove I displayed an Adults Only sign at the entrance of. The front of that wall, facing the street, was where I kept the few standard portraits I brought, mostly pets, but a female face or two. I might sell one during the whole show, probably the black and white cat with the adorably mismatched eyes. These pieces were there to remind people that I did commissions.
I never sold the portraits of people. Who buys a portrait of a stranger to hang in their house?
The people who buy the portraits of strangers that I display
behind
that wall, that's who. My nudes. It is kind of a sketchy little dark space back there, but I prefer it to the creeps and morons who display nudes out in the open at shows, where hundred of twelve year-olds will see them.
I want to be clear, the nudes are not a huge portion of my sales. Landscapes are where I make my mortgage and utilities. But I do sell a decent number of naked lithographs. And I sell a whole bunch of landscape prints from my bins to people who buy them as an excuse to 'just pop into the back to see what's there'...
I hung the guys first, then went to put up the larger number of female nudes. I looked at the particularly awesome form of Helen Smyth, which I always hang in pride of place. She knows I sell lithos of her portrait and gets a huge kick out of it. So does her husband. He is a very lucky guy, I thought, not for the first time. I found myself wondering again if Kylie might have been serious about doing a sitting...
The show wasn't supposed to be open until one on the first day, so when I finished early setting up, I took a walk to drink in the atmosphere. This arts fair is held annually on the banks of what the locals charmingly call a 'river'. They had recently spent millions of dollars building one small dam, while dynamiting another, and what was once a wide, muddy eyesore was now a narrow, fast flowing stream, winding through a grassy, landscaped field in the middle of downtown. I leaned on the concrete rail and drank in the view of the clean, swift water, sparkling in the sunlight, making everything around it feel brisk and fresh.
