The Death Artist Read Online Free PDF

?”
    Willie couldn’t come up with an answer, had no idea, just a feeling. But, man, what a feeling. To be drawing, making lines into something, seeing the images come together, giving them life, getting lost way inside his head. Maybe it was just a world he created on paper, but plenty far away from the lousy world of the Bronx tenement.
    The memory faded, replaced with another, the argument he had had with Elena, just the other day.
    “I’m sick and tired of being referred to as a black artist. I’m an artist! Period.”
    “Look, Willie. It’s not a good thing to deny your blackness. Impossible. Hey, I’m a Latina. And a performance artist. And a woman. That’s who I am. It defines me.”
    “Deny my blackness? Are you kidding? Look at my work. It’s a classification, see? A category. One of the best black artists. A goddamn qualification! Like my art is something less, like there are different rules or separate criteria for artists of color – like I can’t compete with white artists in the white art world. Don’t you get that?”
    He still believed he was right, but wanted to patch things up. After all, Elena was his best friend, more like a sister. He’d see her tonight, could fix the argument then.
    Willie shut off the television and stood in the silence. He was gripped by a sudden unease, a nonspecific gloominess about the evening ahead. What is it ? He rolled his shoulders inside the leather jacket, tried to toss it off. Whatever it was, he’d soon forget it. After all, dinner with his three favorite people–Kate, Richard, and Elena–no way he could be depressed or anxious around that trio.
    But out on the street, as he headed toward the East Village, there it was, this time as if someone had spliced microseconds of a movie into his brain–
    An arm slicing through space. A twisted, screaming mouth in close-up. Everything blood red. Then black.
    Willie sagged against the street lamp, gripped the cool metal for support.
    His mother, Iris, used to say he could feel things before they happened. But it had been years since he’d had one of these visions.
    No. Too many days alone in the studio. That’s all. He just needed to get out more.

CHAPTER 3

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    Crosby Street was clogged with traffic. Horns blared; a cabbie shouted obscenities at workmen tossing bales of fabric remnants out the back end of a truck angled across the street like a train wreck.
    But once Willie crossed Broadway, the scene shifted to boutiques and contemporary art galleries jostling for space, and inconceivably stylish, good-looking people taking themselves very seriously in their studied black costumes.
    One of them, a youngish man, hair stripped Harlow-white, with an inch of black roots that matched the perfect two-day stubble on his thin cheeks, called out to Willie.
    Oliver Pratt-Smythe, Willie’s least favorite artist in New York–which was saying a lot. He and Willie had been a double bill in a London gallery a couple of years earlier. Pratt-Smythe, the more seasoned of the two, and the more savvy, had arrived two days before Willie and had covered the gallery’s floor with horsehair. Planting himself in the center of the space at a large noisy sewing machine, he would spend every day running horsehair through the machine making–what? Willie never could figure it out. About the only thing Willie could plainly see was that it was virtually impossible for viewers to reach his work without plowing through foot-deep horsehair, clumps of which had adhered themselves to the heavily encrusted surfaces of Willie’s paintings. For months afterward, Willie was plucking the stuff out with tweezers.
    Now he nodded without enthusiasm, taking in the careful paint smudges on Pratt-Smythe’s otherwise brand-new black jeans. Odd: the guy was not a painter.
    Without being asked, Pratt-Smythe started ticking off accomplishments. “Having a show in Düsseldorf,” he said, a look of world-weary ennui in his flat gray eyes.