Pug Hill Read Online Free
Author: Alison Pace
right there.
I settle into my chair and look over again at Elliot, hunched studiously over an Old Master landscape, as oblivious to me and to everyone else as he usually is. He reaches up to brush his curly light brown hair—a light brown color that I like to think is almost red—away from his forehead. I sigh quietly and turn away from him. I turn toward my easel to contemplate Mark Rothko’s No. 13, ( White, Red on Yellow ), the painting I’ve just begun to work on. It’s a large canvas, a field of luminous yellow with a white rectangle at the top and a red rectangle at the bottom. What’s happened to this Rothko is that sometime before the painting made its way to the Met, it was stored in a place where the humidity level wasn’t quite right and the canvas expanded and contracted, and the paint on it didn’t. Dry paint isn’t flexible, isn’t malleable at all; it can’t expand and contract the way a canvas can. So now, there are a few flecks of missing paint in each section, and my job is to match the color exactly, to fill in the missing spots. With something like a Rothko, where color is so important, where color might just be everything, there isn’t any room for error. Everything you do has to be perfect, just as everything you add has to be reversible, and I have to admit, I think the restoration of this painting, the precision that it will demand, might take me forever. I haven’t been sure of where to begin and I’m certainly not sure now.
As I stare at it, losing focus, for a moment all I can see is red, and I decide, a bit brazenly really, to start with the red. I flip through my paintbrushes, looking for the smallest, thinnest one. I don’t know if I should attempt much more, after the finding of the paintbrush, because right now I’m finding it harder and harder to be sure of anything. The only thing I’m sure of is that after the knowledge that I will have to make a speech—a real, actual speech in front of people!—in the near enough future, and after the disappointment that is Pug Hill when the pugs aren’t there, the last thing I really want to do is spend the last few hours of the day swimming in the sea of unprofessed love that work has become.
It wasn’t always like this. The sea of unprofessed love used to be known only as the Conservation Studio at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Debilitating crush on coworker notwithstanding, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, of all the wonderful places in New York, has always been my favorite place. When I find myself alone here, after hours, walking through the Egyptian wing, wandering in the sculpture rooms, the halls after halls of European and American paintings, I’m still, after so many years, struck by the sheer awesomeness, the real beauty of it all. I’ve always loved the museum. I’ve always loved the type of concentrated, focused work that I do here, restoring masterpieces of art, erasing any imperfections. The museum has always been such a sanctuary to me. That is until Elliot showed up and my sanctuary became a place where, sometimes, if you listened really carefully, you could hear Patsy Cline singing “Crazy” in the background.
I turn away from Elliot. I put on my magnifying visor, pull the magnifying part down over my eyes and look at the red part of my Rothko. I wonder briefly if maybe I shouldn’t start with the white part or the yellow part, rather than the red. The red, and I know this, has a way of being so hard.
At 5:30 exactly, the phone rings. I try my best to ignore it.
“Conservation.” I hear Sergei’s heavy voice from across the room, and then louder, projecting, “Elliot, it is Claire!”
“Thanks, man,” Elliot says. He turns away from his easel, reaches for his phone and brings it to his mouth. “Hey,” he says, his voice softer, sweeter than it generally is. Claire.
Right, there’s that. There’s Claire. Maybe I should have mentioned it. There’s another thing about the impossibility of there
I settle into my chair and look over again at Elliot, hunched studiously over an Old Master landscape, as oblivious to me and to everyone else as he usually is. He reaches up to brush his curly light brown hair—a light brown color that I like to think is almost red—away from his forehead. I sigh quietly and turn away from him. I turn toward my easel to contemplate Mark Rothko’s No. 13, ( White, Red on Yellow ), the painting I’ve just begun to work on. It’s a large canvas, a field of luminous yellow with a white rectangle at the top and a red rectangle at the bottom. What’s happened to this Rothko is that sometime before the painting made its way to the Met, it was stored in a place where the humidity level wasn’t quite right and the canvas expanded and contracted, and the paint on it didn’t. Dry paint isn’t flexible, isn’t malleable at all; it can’t expand and contract the way a canvas can. So now, there are a few flecks of missing paint in each section, and my job is to match the color exactly, to fill in the missing spots. With something like a Rothko, where color is so important, where color might just be everything, there isn’t any room for error. Everything you do has to be perfect, just as everything you add has to be reversible, and I have to admit, I think the restoration of this painting, the precision that it will demand, might take me forever. I haven’t been sure of where to begin and I’m certainly not sure now.
As I stare at it, losing focus, for a moment all I can see is red, and I decide, a bit brazenly really, to start with the red. I flip through my paintbrushes, looking for the smallest, thinnest one. I don’t know if I should attempt much more, after the finding of the paintbrush, because right now I’m finding it harder and harder to be sure of anything. The only thing I’m sure of is that after the knowledge that I will have to make a speech—a real, actual speech in front of people!—in the near enough future, and after the disappointment that is Pug Hill when the pugs aren’t there, the last thing I really want to do is spend the last few hours of the day swimming in the sea of unprofessed love that work has become.
It wasn’t always like this. The sea of unprofessed love used to be known only as the Conservation Studio at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Debilitating crush on coworker notwithstanding, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, of all the wonderful places in New York, has always been my favorite place. When I find myself alone here, after hours, walking through the Egyptian wing, wandering in the sculpture rooms, the halls after halls of European and American paintings, I’m still, after so many years, struck by the sheer awesomeness, the real beauty of it all. I’ve always loved the museum. I’ve always loved the type of concentrated, focused work that I do here, restoring masterpieces of art, erasing any imperfections. The museum has always been such a sanctuary to me. That is until Elliot showed up and my sanctuary became a place where, sometimes, if you listened really carefully, you could hear Patsy Cline singing “Crazy” in the background.
I turn away from Elliot. I put on my magnifying visor, pull the magnifying part down over my eyes and look at the red part of my Rothko. I wonder briefly if maybe I shouldn’t start with the white part or the yellow part, rather than the red. The red, and I know this, has a way of being so hard.
At 5:30 exactly, the phone rings. I try my best to ignore it.
“Conservation.” I hear Sergei’s heavy voice from across the room, and then louder, projecting, “Elliot, it is Claire!”
“Thanks, man,” Elliot says. He turns away from his easel, reaches for his phone and brings it to his mouth. “Hey,” he says, his voice softer, sweeter than it generally is. Claire.
Right, there’s that. There’s Claire. Maybe I should have mentioned it. There’s another thing about the impossibility of there
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