The electrical cord plugged firmly into the outlet, Henri double-checked the coaxial cables at both ends to ensure a proper internet connection, then gave the modem a shake. Fanning the modem proved useless, so Henri ran a tub. In the hallway, Henri stepped out of his briefs. In the kitchen, he checked the time: noon, jiggled the knob on the back door, then walked to the front room of his apartment. After turning the key in the front door’s deadbolt and sliding the chain guard into the slot, Henri did a quick check of himself, breathed a sigh of relief, and lowered the front room shades. Eager to continue his work once his connection was restored, Henri—seven days free of regrets—and as confident as the Creator on day six, proceeded solemnly, head lowered, hands folded as if in prayer, to his bath.
Henri’s past regrets were as follows: One, having failed to purchase the land he’d had his eyes on. And two: not having built his house himself, had the chance been granted him, and he’d gone ahead and purchased—had he had the funds— the one-acre parcel. Squandering his chances then was what, on most days—though not this day nor the previous six days—riled Henri to no end. What concerned Henri on this day, internet connections notwithstanding, was the pace at which he was mastering Adobe Photoshop to create, in digital form, what he was certain would be his masterpiece.
To date, Henri had created two folders on his desktop for his projects: “Plot of Land (in Paris, Texas) with House of My Own Design,” which contained nothing, since he rarely left his apartment to view available land in Paris, Texas; and a second folder for his art project, titled “For Appropriation Purposes.” This folder contained screenshots of André Derain’s La jetée à L’Estaque; Maurice de Vlaminck’s The Seine at Chatou; Henri Matisse’s Olive trees at Collioure; Derain’s Paysage à Cassis, and, of course, Le Bonheur de Vivre, also by Matisse.
Of these five images, two would be used to create his masterwork.
Could the second Matisse painting, despite the figurative elements, be one of the two? Henri wondered as he worked his favorite coconut-scented shampoo into a luxurious lather on his scalp. Henri was about to commit to the screenshot of Le Bonheur de vivre in the folder on his desktop screen when the rose-colored shop towels that he used as washcloths, folded and pressed damp on the tub’s sloped edges—like sandbags on a riverbank, Henri liked to think—slid into the tub onto his private parts, and the image presented itself.
Apart from its astounding clarity and considerable scale, the image before him held little of the extraordinary: a few bare trees, a distant hill, some hollows in the foreground, a clump of uprooted soil. But then the extraordinary happened: The masterful strokes of vine charcoal. Henri watched a phantom hand create additional trees with a few vertical or slightly slanted strokes. Vigorous shading and rubbings created additional shadows, charcoal build-up, additional clumps of soil. A winding path which receded, even as it rose from bottom left to upper right in vine charcoal, then from right to left in a scraggly line, created the horizon, with the path descending beyond it.
“Ay, Dios mío,” said Henri.
Had Henri had a shower curtain and been standing upright, he might have swatted at the image the way one does when a transparent shower curtain stamped with impressions of nature is stuck to one’s leg.
Slumped in the tub with coconut-scented suds trickling down his face and into his eyes, convinced that this image, as well as the other steamier one from the secret files in his head which appeared on his computer screen like wallpaper, was the effect of hours staring at his computer screen, Henri spread a rose-colored shop towel over his face. His scalp tingled; the dollop of creamy suds atop his head worked into a fragrant lather: Henri had forgotten to rinse. Henri scooped water into his hands and poured it over his head. But the cleansing agent, having settled well past the recommended five-minute “curing time,” had activated, penetrating his skull with its mysterious ingredients. Current, after perhaps dangerous chemical current, was absorbed by Henri’s hungry brain.
Awash in tingling sensations and such near-genuine emotions as to make anyone suddenly burst giddy and hysterical from their shower in song, Henri stretched out in his tub with his arms crossed behind his head. His mind in autopilot mode, Henri scanned the great empty spaces between forms, as grand as—Henri had never seen such spatial breadth as surrounded him. Did such distances exist? With a dollop of creamy suds streaming from his head into his eyes, Henri was in no position to debate space, distance, or forms. He pinched his nose and went under.
His computer humming in the front room, his head and face cleared of suds, Henri imagined himself in the waters of a small lake, at one with the image. Comfortable and carefree as a man in his mid-years, enjoying the pleasures of an afternoon bath could be, with the Spinning Wheel of Death, aka the ‘wait cursor,’ spinning on one’s digital files, indicating a possible overloaded WiFi network, or high-resolution JPEG processing.
A lake, a cabin, a comfortable and spacious cabin . . .
Yes. A cabin that, unlike his rented flat, he could call his own.
Yesssss . . . at the edge of a la. . . .zzzzzz
So many rented flats over the years. The most recent: a studio apartment in Queens, New York, with a fire escape, which Henri occasionally used for one particularly messy step in creating his collage-based artworks with a gritty NYC flavor.
The process of removing event posters from outdoor sites for recycling in his studio: arranging the posters alongside pages from National Geographic, Vogue, Mademoiselle, Playboy, Hustler. The Yellow Pages. The obituary section of The New York Times. When so arranged, Henri flung paint Ab-Ex-style on the whole lot. Using his special papier-mache glue mix, Henri doused, scrunched, and pressed his soggy material into chunky blocks the size of cereal boxes. The best of the Chunky Works were those scrunched inside actual cereal boxes! Once cured and dried, Henri, much to his neighbors’ dismay, took a rotary sander to the works on the fire escape. The results, aside from being ordered to vacate the premises, were delightfully detailed, jewel-like artworks of pigment and urban debris, of great fragility—or Trash Art.
Alas, Trash Art was nothing new in NYC. Two back-to-back exhibitions, one at his local library, the other at a barbershop, went largely unseen. Distraught. Mostly disgusted. About to go underground, Henri read in the obituaries of his grandmother’s passing. From his estranged attorney-brother and foot-doctor-sister, he learned of his inheritance. Henri bid adios to NYC and Bonjour to the Midwest in a three-room flat in Paris, Illinois.
Henri was thirty-seven when he met Liloú, thirteen years his senior. Liloú worked at a meatpacking plant, wore a hairnet 24/7, a silver-plated, rhinestone-studded Eiffel Tower coat pin on her lapel, and baked Henri delicious beef cassoulets thrice a week. When Liloú turned 50 and the plant in Paris, Illinois, shut down, and Henri learned of a California artist who also used salvaged street materials as social constructs to great success, Henri said fuck it. Having also learned of Paris, Texas, and its near full-scale Eiffel Tower, crowned year-round with a cowboy hat, Henri destroyed all but one of the Chunky Works he’d brought to Paris, Illinois. This salvaged work he wrapped and left outside Liloú’s trailer as a gift for all her hearty meals.
As a resident of Paris, Texas, with a refurbished computer from Best Buy, Henri surfed the net. He found Artsy. He found Artnet. He found the Smithsonian Collection. Closed the tab. And bookmarked London’s National Gallery of Art Archives as well as ArtMajeur. As fate would have it, Henri also found the other image: a Romanian porn star in her well-known, often searched for, often screenshotted and saved image of her, a scarf worn on her head like a cleaning woman, her denim skirt raised above her “thik” Liloú-like behind, her knickers around her ankles. Much as he enjoyed the image, Henri was not about to be duped, as he had been when he found the porn magazines in a NYC trash bin years ago; Henri had believed his find to be his just reward for hours of uncompensated labor, peeling posters from urban sites, and whatnot, when in fact it was what kept Henri from plunging— metaphorically speaking—head-first into his process to achieve his dreams, whether as a man with property on his mind or an artist with a deep yearning how to practice social construct art. Most likely, the “pornstar as cleaning woman screenshot” dragged into and out of his computer’s trash bin so many times was what dislodged Henri’s past resentments.
However diligent Henri was in his daily searches on ArtMajeur for ‘ideas on art as property,’ maybe assets, come nightfall, Henri wound up in his computer’s trash bin, searching for ass.
Assets! Not asses. Henri vowed.
Was it the cleansing baths that helped purge Henri’s desire for porn? Stranger things have been known to happen. After a quick nude stroll through his flat with the shades drawn and his hands held in prayer, Henri was back at his computer, screenshotting French paintings to drop into his folder. On rare occasions when the urge for thick-pornstar-as-cleaning-woman-ass struck him and his hands strayed south, Henri went to the wallpaper on his screen. One look at Jacques-Louis-David’s Death of Marat, followed by a hearty scrub in his very own claw-foot bathtub minus the sheet and blood-stained letter portrayed in the David painting, and Henry was back renaming files at his workstation.
Awakened from his slumber by the upstairs neighbor’s shouts followed by a door slam, Henri waited for the dreaded knock on his door. But upon hearing the sharp scrapes of claws on the metal stairs that led to the parking lot— the apartment building’s layout was similar to a two-story motel; a parking lot surrounded on three sides by apartments—and checking the time; it was 2 pm, the hour his neighbor walked her dog, Henri breathed a sigh of relief and continued his musings in the stillness of a sparse landscape. But no matter how hard Henri tried to convince himself he was at one with the image, its near-sacrosanct quality kept Henri at bay. Frustrated in tepid bathwater, his computer no longer humming in the front room, Henri adjusted the temperature.
Submerged to his ears, Henri listened to the sound of his blood reverberating and coursing through his veins, to the pops and creaks of his bones as he rolled about in his tub. Sitting upright, Henri heard the splash of water on the bathroom floor, the claws scraping the stairs, and his neighbor’s return to her flat above his.
My creaking bones . . . . is not charcoal merely bone?
Scalding water from the faucet on his toes, Henri shut the faucet off. His arm dangling over the side of the tub, his head pressed Marat-like against his shoulder, Henri watched with no small amount of incredulity as a tiny figure trailing charcoal dust strolled up his arm. Then onto the tub, where it hopped onto the very image that kept him at arm’s length! An image Henri considered his and his alone. What a bold and strange trespasser thought Henri now, upright in the tub, as the image, as ‘place,’ or property, even offered little to next to nothing to risk trespassing through.
While observing the dusty little figure setting up what appeared to be an easel in the barren landscape—since his release from “the other,” Henri, forever on the lookout for significant art moments, felt the significance of just such a moment: himself held purposely at arm’s length as witness to the making of a soon-to-be–historical landscape. The type of painted landscape considered meaningful and worthy of looking at in museums. One whose importance shall be assured with a signature. And in this way belongs to us, here in Paris, Texas, and elsewhere, if at least by way of one’s personal achievement. Namely mine.
And although this was not entirely incorrect, these were his thoughts, his perception, his ambition—as well as his search for a way forward into his masterwork, and then back to his computer to render said masterwork in digital form— his eyes and mind, his files and screenshots, his tub and sort of his water, there had yet to arrive the point, where, in order to make manifest his vision, Henri would have to wrest it. And wrest it he would. A chignón, if ever there was one, Henri would wrest with the best of them.
But for now, where a hill rose ever so slightly, the tiny figure trotting downhill, easel in hand, apparently with a change of mind about his placement, headed toward a clearing in the woods that had gone unnoticed by Henri. A wooden carrying case, such as is used by plein-air painters to transport their tubes of precious pigments, was strapped to the little figure’s back. Henri’s prevailing belief, stemming from his once-obsessive notions on property, ownership, and the status that follows, was that the box might contain, or be used to contain and transport, not pigments but mere bills and liens on property.
Drawing on his knowledge of the great modern era of French art, what he knew about destitute French artists’ lives, and his own belief that artists are born, not made, and that they were often broke, this was the reason Henri had not attended art school. For even an MFA did not ensure artists earned a living. Nor did Henri believe it fair to saddle artists with the burden of “Professional Artist” when “Starving Artist” was weighty enough. Acknowledging what was quite possibly a starving artist carrying his easel through a barren landscape; a landscape Henri was beginning to see was a preparatory image for him and no one else to wrest, and that, should he succeed to replicate the image in digital form, he, Henri, would be on his way to creating a masterwork that would rival those of the Modern era: Le Bonheur de Vivre, Les Violin and Pallette, Houses at L’Estaque, Les Demoiselles d Avingnon, and even The Bride Stripped Bare (by her lovers even), Henri leapt from the tub.
In the clearing in the woods that had escaped Henri’s attention, a ring of nude, fleshy women pranced about the desolate landscape in rapturous abandon—that which the French call joie de vivre— waving their brightly colored underthings.
Pigments? Not bills? Pues que chingadera es esto . . . .
Henri’s scalp tingled.
If this belongs to me—Henri whispered seated on the edge of the tub, while the hot water ran and the image, trickling with moisture dripped from the wall, and unfurled like wallpaper from the edges of Henri’s mind—then clearly it is I who shall bring to digital form thoughts that have been evolving, through, of all things, the genre of landscape painting from the early part of the 20th century, especially the works of the Fauve period I’d once taken a fancy to and wished I owned. One painting would have sufficed.
But how?
How to bring to digital form what was fading from the bathroom wall of his mind? It came to Henri while observing the tiny figure now in the farthest regions of his mind: The folder on his desktop screen! The one titled “For Appropriation Purposes” held screenshots of well-known works from the early Modern Era, among them Le Bonheur de Vivre.
The little painter whom Henri suspected was none other than the other Henri; he seemed to be arranging his women in a pose reminiscent of his famous masterpiece. The colors, the yellows and pinks, the blues, and the green— Vermillion Green, Dios mio! Straight from the tube . . . ugh—were yet to come.
The idea of another artist, no matter their size, traipsing across his point of view to arrange and caress those that were his to caress, caused Henri to bristle. He thought to write a statement, an artist statement, to convey ownership. But then thought of his favorite artist: When asked during an interview about artist statements, Henri’s favorite artist replied: “Did Elvis have an artist statement? Did Picasso? Man, fuck artist statements!” Fuck them indeed. Henri, too, would forgo the artist statement and go directly to the wresting of his work.
Shivering, riddled with goosebumps, Henri watched the artist begin to paint the women as they appeared in the famous painting, Le Bonheur de Vivre. Henry had had enough. He pulled the stopper from the tub’s drain, turned the shower on, and the burly artist, his canvases, his box of precious pigments, the romping girls, and whatever else was in Henri’s head as scant details pertaining to his vista were sucked down the drain. Metaphorically speaking.
At precisely 3:18 pm, Henri’s internet was restored. By 3:30, sketchpad and charcoal in his hands as firmly as the little painter had held his precious box of pigments, Henri began to sketch the image from memory. By 6 pm, with the image completed as close to the original—as a transparent shower curtain etched with impressions of nature, sans curtain— Henri breathed a sigh of relief.
The Texas sun dropped over the horizon, and night settled over Paris, Texas.
Henri reheated his leftovers, fideo con puerco y calabasas, from the previous night in the microwave, set the timer to three minutes, and pressed start. In the front room, about to lower himself onto his squeaky chair to watch the day’s news on his computer, Henri heard three loud raps on his door. He froze: knees bent, arms held out, about to sit. Some days before, ICE had arrived wearing balaclavas and leather dusters and left with a few handcuffed tenants in tow.
“Open up,” said the voice.
Henri Hernandez’s first thought was: the goddamn Texas sun’s gone down, the streets are cool and dark, and there are no streetlights. I’ll just run out the back door like any American citizen carrying his modem, computer, and keyboard.
“I know you’re in there, Hernandez. Open the door; it’s the new super. Got a complaint about water leaking from the unit directly below yours. You know anything about this, Hernandez? Ok, well, don’t use up all the hot water.”
All’s well that ends well. The microwave beeped. Henri Hernandez looked forward to a peaceful evening meal, with warm tortillas without ICE, and sneezed.
For days while working on his computer, Henri Hernandez sneezed and wheezed, growing sicker with each passing day. While searching his “Appropriation” folder, Henri dodged a virus attack. While waiting out the Spinning Wheel of Death, sneezing, and coughing, Henri was resolved to choose any Fauvist period landscape by Derain, as all of Derain’s landscapes were suitable for his purpose, and to go with the first Matisse image in his folder, which was Matisse’s Olive Trees at Collioure, but no, Henri stuck with Le Bonheur de Vivre.
Selecting “landscape format” in Photoshop, Henri created a file 10 feet x 8 feet, then uploaded, first, the Derain. He selected the right side of Derain’s landscape with the cursor, clicked, and the right side was cut, enlarged, and slid to the left side of the file. He did the same with the Matisse, only in reverse: the landscape’s left side was selected, cut, enlarged, and the image slid to the file’s right side. Thus spliced, with the left side of the Derain landscape joined to the right side of the Matisse landscape, a third unique work was created.
Next, Henri reduced the digital image to its fundamental composition of line and space by using Photoshop’s photocopy filter. Color and some, but not all, texture were eliminated, and the figures on the Mattise side were removed using Photoshop’s eraser tool. While creating a grid on the digital image, Henri experienced the symptoms of pneumonia he found online on WebMD: severe cough, chills, fever, and increasing chest pain, as well as disgusting green mucus and coughing. While spitting out mucus, Henri figured the total to be 88 sheets of letter-sized copy paper. Coughing, sneezing, and spitting, but obsessed and so steadfast, Henri converted PSD files to JPEGs and used the grid component to select, snap-to, and save them.
As JPEGS, Henri, near delirious, reminded himself.
Henri saved them as follows: Row 1 Left to Right 1-10. R2 L2R1-10, etc., all the way down to Row 8.
Having decided to include a figure, ‘the artist at one in nature.’ Henri searched until he found the image of the great post-impressionist painter Paul Cézanne on his way to paint Mount Victoria. Carajo! said Henri, realizing it was Paul Cézanne, not Henri Matisse, who he thought had traipsed across his image, to strangely appropriate—strange because Cézanne, working well before Matisse, could not have known of Le Bonheur de Vivre. As his fever rose, Henri Hernandez—as befits the French, or mostly French, masters of the early modern era—continued his work heroically dazed, near-broiling, sipping red wine at his computer. Having also decided against the “House of My Own Design,” in favor of the artist-at-one-in-nature element, Henri dropped the artist into his digital version of nature using a Photoshop layer. He looked, then hit the eye icon to hide it. He hit it again to bring it back. Back and forth, feverish with a spinning head full of houses and artists in nature, and a racing pulse, he did so, until, unable to choose, Henri deleted the layer and made a note to upload an image of himself, at one with nature, to use in place of the great Provence painter now his mentor, at a later date, in another composition, if I am so inc . . .
Later that night, “the super” found Henri Hernandez’s door open and Henri unconscious in the doorway.
***
It was spring when Henri Hernandez was released from the hospital at the end of a charming, cobblestoned street, such as are found in the works of famous landscape painters, and to one particular non-French painter, who was anything but famous in his lifetime. The hospital’s roof was the same rose color as Henri’s shop towels, as Henri found and said to the orderly who had so struggled to ease Henri’s wheelchair through the hospital’s massive wooden doors that Henri ended up walking his wheelchair while the orderly held the doors open, which was no small feat.
It was twilight, and though there were no streetlights that Henri could see— which didn’t mean there weren’t any; Henri didn’t have his glasses on—the street was absolutely aglow. To his left, Henri spotted Juan, the super at the corner, talking on his cellphone and waving Henri over. Henri assumed Juan had been sent to assist him. Henri thanked the orderly, and, as if it were any evening stroll through the old section of Paris, Texas, Henri proceeded slowly up the street. Juan turned the corner. Henri passed a café in the middle of the block. On any other night, had Henri ever wandered into this part, or any other part of Paris, Texas, he would have ordered a latte, a slice of Tres Leche cake, and chatted with the burly men drinking Paris, Texas wine.
Henri walked on, past what looked, and indeed may have been, a mosque. Turning the corner, Henri saw Juan, still on the phone, gesticulating wildly, pacing to and fro under the pink awning of what might have been a bakery.
It was clear to Henri when Juan turned and waved for Henri to hurry up that Juan was in a rush.
It was a lovely night, and Henri, on his feet for the first time in weeks, was not about to be rushed. Henri stood at the corner observing the scene: the café, the red-roofed hospital at the other end of the street. The viaduct that abutted the little hospital. The railroad track, with a train passing above the viaduct, and a cyclist riding under and through it. The sky, which was a glorious Cobalt blue with darker crisscrossed patches to the east or west; Henri wasn’t sure.
“Can we move on, Hernandez? I haven’t got all night. Management ordered me to pick you up. My car’s around the corner.”
A mother and her teenage daughter in long skirts: The mother, pulling her young son by the hand, seemed headed for the café: To collect her husband, perhaps, thought Henri. Go easy on him
“You’d think they would understand and put off the damn hedge cutting until tomorrow.”
Henri patted Juan on the shoulder, handed him his bag, and told him to go ahead.
“I’ve been in bed for who knows how long. I’ll walk from here, Juan, but please take my bag.”
Juan shrugged, said, “Suit yourself,” and tossed Henry’s bag into the backseat of his car.
“Love the color,” Henri said, his eyes on the yellow building on the corner with the green shutters on the windows of the upper floor and a green door at street level with a for-rent sign that read— Inquire at café.
“Red rose of Texas,” Juan said, about the color of his Toyota, as Henri turned the corner and walked back to the café.
In the café, Henri asked about the availability of the corner building and was directed to a patron seated outside. The price was right. Henri said he would return the next day, then asked what part of town they were in.
“The part of town we’d like to keep as is. No realtors snooping around,” was the burly landlord’s reply.
“Gotcha, mum’s the word.”
Another month passed before Henry felt strong enough to work. Juan helped move Henri’s printer and art supplies to his new studio. Afternoons would find Henri strolling through what he figured was the old part of town. Come evening, Henri enjoyed café life and learned to play dominoes. He found a way up the railroad tracks and was often seen, late at night, seated above the viaduct with his legs dangling. He visited the mosque. Left his shoes by the entrance. Held his hands in prayer. Kept his head lowered.
The glow, especially at night—there were no streetlights—mystified Henri. Almost as much as the dimness in his studio on days when the sun shone. Because of the trouble Henri had orienting himself in the shadowy studio, he placed the printer to the right of his studio as an anchor and the canvas to the left. With himself between the two, Henri walked in circles, head lowered, hands held in prayer, fully clothed every morning until the morning when the urge to create so overwhelmed him that he was thrust to the right.
Holy Week: In his studio, with all steps of his digital phase, across countless JPEG files completed, Henri Hernandez, dressed in a smock and beret, with his soon-to-be masterwork printing in batches on his inkjet printer, was ready for work. At the foot of the street, inside a corner house painted yellow, under a star-studded sky, with lit candles around the main room, the last letter-sized copy was spat from printer to floor.
Henri worked through the night. Checking and double-checking the copies to be sure that all extraneous detail was omitted and properly increased to size, so that when placed side by side— Henri had found a way to transfer and thus impact the stretched canvas with minimally expansive detail—the 88 sheets of 8.5 x 11 copy paper comprised the image at 10’ x 8’. That done, Henri took his meds, brewed a cup of tea, and with Paris on his mind, he set to work.
Henri taped the letter-sized sheets together, then laid them atop the canvas. On his knees, with carbon paper, between facsimile and canvas, Henri traced the scant lines onto the canvas. It was at this point, on hands and knees, with all unnecessary labor excluded but for the purchase and use of a copier and carbon paper, that Henri entered into the no-nonsense world of the contemporary artist. As was made evident in the work’s title. Without giving away too much, Henri felt that Aggressive Apprehensions best described the angst and doubt he felt when the Photocopy filter, once applied, stripped away color and texture, leaving only a skeletal design, while leaving much open for the viewer to ponder. With the keen eye of the speculator, Henri realized that what the conjoined work offered, apart from conjoined vistas, of course, was the possibility for further speculation through expansion. And in this way, Henri Hernandez came to realize that his approach to and process of digital space were analogous to the landowner’s aim of increasing a property’s worth by acquiring all adjoining properties. And thus, he expanded.
Con Quidado, Henri Hernandez said aloud as he traced the few remaining lines that defined hills, hollows, and clumps. When completed, the conjoined, expanded work derived, as all great works are, from what came before them, in Henri’s case, the modern works of the early 20th-century masters Derain and Matisse. Having wrested, eliminated, and ultimately re-represented his vision as near unidentifiable, though he, Henri, could certainly discern it, Henri was—as one is when another of mankind’s great achievements is concluded—pleased and ready for a drink. Beyond-measure-pleased.
It was Friday, Good Friday. Inside the church, kitty-corner from the bright yellow building with green shutters, the saints were draped in purple.
