"So what is this 'fine art?"'
Hendrik shook his head. He went into the house and came out with two more beers. "Let's start with everything else," he said. "It's easier." He pried off the bottle caps. "Everything else is commercial art—calendar graphics or posters or paintings of lighthouses, fall foliage, the streets of Paris—that kind of stuff, done in familiar styles. Nothing wrong with it. But it isn't art; it's craft." He drank. "It's craft because the painters know what they're doing when they start. Some of the paintings seem magical, but it's trick magic. They know how to get the rabbit out of the hat. An artist—capital A—doesn't know what's in the hat or how to get it out."
"Hmm," Patrick said.
"A guy in Vermont came up with that comparison—Robert Francis. It's like this, Patrick: an artist needs to make a picture that expresses how he feels about something or someone or some place. Since every artist is different, good paintings, true paintings, are original."
"True?"
"Yeah, true to the artist's feelings," Hendrik said.
"True," Patrick said, turning the word over in his mind.
"It's not so easy. What the hell, I'll show you." Hendrik got up and led Patrick to his studio.
"Look there," he said, pointing at a wall covered with charcoal drawings of a nude Julie Van Slyke, fifteen years younger. "Those are studies I made before I did the painting. You can see how I kept circling around the central idea, this line here." He moved one hand through the air as though he were stroking her hip. "Once I got it right, it was mostly a matter of color. Not a bad painting, as it turned out."
Patrick saw what Hendrik meant through a light haze of embarrassment. He took a drink from his bottle of Heineken and acted grown up. Mrs. Van Slyke was leaning forward. She had unexpectedly exotic breasts that hung and then swelled upwards. "The thing is, it can take a while before you get it. Sometimes you never get it. I've been working on this one all year." Hendrik walked over to a heavy wooden easel. A canvas, half painted, half sketched in pencil, showed a young man sitting by a fireplace and holding a guitar. His chair was sideways to the fire. His body and guitar were turned toward the painter. There was a wine bottle on the floor next to the chair.