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When actually, you can assign numbers to hue and value, and they’ll follow predictable patterns. Bright pink looks like it’s vibrating on top of bright green. The pink square looks bigger on the black square and smaller on the white one.
It isn’t magic. It’s just numbers and common sense.
Rikki leans over my shoulder. She touches a brown triangle that I’d laid over a pale pink one and reverses the order. “Nice, this one. But work with bigger pieces, hmm? It’s hard to see with such small triangles that you have made.”
“I don’t want to waste paper.”
“Always I have one student who is afraid to waste. We will do paintings and you will choose the smallest canvas, or we will make sculpture and you will make something so tiny.” She cups her hands in space, showing me the size of my imaginary sculpture. “Wasting is what the paper is for.”
“Maybe I just don’t like throwing money away.”
“Or maybe you are afraid to take up too much space in the world,” she says. “I think for my class, you should be as wasteful as you can be. Cut up all the paper. Make the biggest paintings. Then we will see what you can do, hmm?” She leaves me alone after that. I push my triangles around, searching for the best arrangements. In the sketchpad I’m required to keep, I jot down some guesses for number values and use them to predict which colors will be the best matches. I’ll try them out on Frankie later, see if I can trick her with them. Then I’ll do bigger versions of the best ones for my portfolio.
It’s a better approach, more logical than Rikki’s.
It doesn’t have anything to do with how much space I want to take up in the world.
Outside after class, I’m thinking about whether all studio art classes come with a side of psychoanalysis or if it’s just Rikki’s art-therapist thing, when I almost walk into Krishna.
I try to go around him. He blocks me.
I feint to the other side, spin, and head off in a different direction, annoyed because I don’t want to be this guy, but I am this guy, and I wish he’d let me alone.
“In case you’re wondering,” he says, jogging up behind me, “I’m not giving up.”
“I’ve got class.”
“That was your last one. Now you’re going home to study, and then you’ve got work.”
“What are you, stalking me?”
“I asked Caroline.”
He runs a few steps to catch up. There’s a lot of foot traffic on the path because class just let out, and in order for Krishna and me to walk side by side, everybody who’s coming the other way has to step off into the snowbank and get their ankles wet.
Krishna clearly doesn’t give a fuck.
I kind of like that about him.
“I’m having a party,” he says. “For my birthday. I want you to come.”
“I can’t.”
“You’re supposed to ask when it is in order to make your excuse more plausible.”
“When is it?”
“Tomorrow night.”
“Oh, tomorrow night. I can’t.”
He tries out a signature my-shit-doesn’t-stink Krishna grin on me. The wind’s gusty, blowing his black hair around, making him look like some kind of Desi movie star. “Sure you can.”
“Fine. I don’t want to.”
“How come?”
“I’m busy.”
