Free Catalogue Raisonne by Mike Barnes Page A

talent’,” she said, and this was before they broke up.”
    Anyway, young Pollock would go dripless at times, and one of these was when his thesis series of paintings was coming due. He went nearly catatonic, seemed to be nearing some kind of breakdown. Claudia did his for him, along with her own of course. She said the challenge wasn’t doing his style but doing them badly enough so no suspicions would be aroused.
    â€œBut they were aroused?”
    â€œSuspicions? No. Only André’s, I think, that if Claudia could do a dozen of his ‘Chaos’ series in two nights, then maybe his B- wasn’t a plot by the painting department to destroy an original talent.”
    â€œThen how . . . what happened?”
    â€œClaudia told the truth.”
    â€œShe ratted her boyfriend out?”
    â€œNo more than she ratted herself out. And he wasn’t her boyfriend by then. She’d caught him with someone else. ‘A Pre-Raphaelite with her mouth full’ – you’d have to see her tell it. Quite obscene, but also quite comical.”
    â€œSo they kicked her out?”
    â€œThey kicked him out. He made a ‘suicidal gesture’” – Robert stroked himself on one wrist then the other – “but that didn’t change
anything. With the college or Claudia. Her they gave the option of repeating fourth year.”
    â€œWhat’d she say?”
    â€œShe says she said, ‘Two times zero would still be zero.’”
    â€œAnd then she quit?”
    â€œOne month before graduation. I told you she had a temper. Mom calls it a talent for self-sabotage.”
    â€œAnd moved here?”
    â€œNot right away. For a year and a half she was making decent money doing faux finishing.” This part I remembered well – it made me think of the cosy life in our Administration, though on a headier scale – so I resumed looking for a way to terminate the game. Faux finishing was a lucrative decoration business – lucrative to the business owners, not to the young painters they hired – painting scenes and reproductions on Forest Hill or Rosedale bathrooms, kitchens, dining rooms. A repro of a Roman bath painting on the wall next to the jacuzzi – done to simulate fresco but just acrylic over latex primer. A Claude Lorrain-ish landscape in the stockbroker’s oak-panelled study. Often the matrons would pick them out of a Jansen History of Art , pointing with a lacquered nail “That one” or “That one would go.”
    â€œThen one day she just walked off the job. When you can get her to talk about it, which isn’t often, she says Toronto taught her all she needs to know about contemporary painting. OCAD, André, faux finishing” – she’ll rhyme them off on her fingers – “‘Three strikes and I’m out.’”
    â€œDo you think she’s really given up?”
    Robert gave no sign of having heard me. He had his head down and was adjusting his cuff links, perhaps in case his Burns supervisor dropped in. “Did I mention André got his own show at a Queen Street gallery?” he said around his cigarette, white smoke rising around his face, veiling it from me.

    â€œSo, she’s given up?” I said a few minutes later, then remembered that I’d asked it already. Christ, I was getting as bad as Robert.

    â€œWell, she paints all the time. Obsessively, I’d say. And she is entering CHOP, if that counts.”
    â€œAngela would say it does.”
    â€œOh, sorry.” With a Peter Lorre glance of remorse.
    Leaving us both – or me at least – to wonder at the difference between giving up and giving up painting. Giving up what, then?
    â€œDo you think it was a case of Hammer-itis?”
    Robert knew what I meant. He hadn’t grown up here, but you didn’t have to live here long to learn the city’s nickname, Hammer. And to observe the tendency of