Art Star
When she made our relationship her muse, everyone wanted a peek.
by Ryan Britt
May 19, 2008
He's really thin. He's naked. He's two-dimensional. If it weren't for the fact that he's lacking a head, he would be six-foot-one. My height. He looks just like me.
My girlfriend, Gabriela, takes a drag of her cigarette, blows the smoke across her Greenpoint studio, turns to look at the real Ryan and asks,
"Do you like it?"
"It looks like me," I say. But I'm lying just a little bit, because while this painting — entitled "White Bread" — has my chest, arms, legs and neck, his penis is bigger than mine.
Dating an artist is tricky. On the one hand, this proportional aberration could be a compliment — maybe this is how Gabriela really sees me. Or it might not mean anything at all, just benign artistic license. Gabriela wore the pants in our relationship and my old, dirty dress shirts to her studio. She would wake up at 8:30 every morning with her short black hair sticking straight up, giving her the appearance of a sexy mad scientist. Without adjusting her coiffure, she would march out of her apartment, mount her bicycle and pedal toward her studio. If it weren't socially frowned upon, I think Gabriela would have left the house naked.
In her past, she'd done nude modeling for art photography. She'd painted abstract canvases depicting the backs of eighteen-wheelers. She was raised in Israel, travels constantly and speaks three languages. I don't need to tell you she's into a lot of bands you've never heard of.
I speak English. I've never left the continental United States. I love Ray Bradbury, and my favorite band is the Beatles. The "White Bread" painting conveys the message that one could surmise all these things just by looking at my skinny white body: this guy might be an okay lover, it says, but he'll start talking about Star Trek as soon as the sex is over. Eventually, Gabriela decided not to render this message as abstractly as she had in "White Bread." Why imply that I talked about Star Trek in bed, or that I cried more than she did, when she could make a whole series of drawings illustrating it explicitly? So she did, and now the story of our romance is forever preserved in a group of gallery-exhibited drawings collectively titled The Ryan Series.
The Ryan Series is twenty-two monochromatic drawings, each depicting a moment from our relationship. Accompanying each piece is a prominent title at the top of the drawing. And while I had my favorites, like "Ryan in the Shower Telling Me He Loves Me Too," the really good ones were less complimentary: "Ryan Crying on the Subway Platform," "Ryan Crying on the L Train," "Ryan Crying on My Couch."
We'd almost broken up several times before she drew "White Bread" and The Ryan Series. During one of these breaks, Gabriela revealed she'd started making drawings about our relationship as a farewell present, a way of preserving her feelings for me within her own craft. But as it turned out, this first group of drawings was the beginning of a burst of productivity. I had become a muse, so we stayed together.
About some of the drawings: "Ryan in the Shower Telling Me He Loves Me Too" was fairly romantic, even though Gabriela's opinion of American romance was extremely low. She once told me she thought of Americans as emotionally infantilized, always afraid to say it when we love someone. She was infuriated by the fact that couples could be together for months or years without saying "I love you." I began to suspect her assessment of American romance was correct — at twenty-five, having weathered a few blows from the Ryan-I-don't-know-what-to-say monster, I'd become reluctant to say "I love you" first. And though I did whisper it once into Gabriela's ear as we passed out in her loft bed after a night of whiskey and billiards, I'm forced to conclude she doesn't remember, or chose not to remember, when she created this drawing. It's a faithful rendering of her shower floor, depicted from a skewed angle, like a shot of the Riddler's lair. Integral to this title was, of course, the word "too," indicating that she'd said it first.
A lot of people have seen The Ryan Series, because the initial run of twenty-two drawings was accepted into the Pierogi Art Gallery's Flat-Files in February 2007. Apparently, when people see this stuff, they don't ask Gabriela how well-endowed I really am. They do ask, however, if I'm good at cunnilingus. The drawing, "Ryan Telling His Mother About Me On The Phone" depicts my furrowed brow and closed eyes buried between her legs. It's easily her funniest title, and though my face is obscured, you can tell I'm giving it my all.
But most of the questions about the drawings have nothing to do with sex. The primary question people ask after viewing them is, "Why does Ryan cry so much?" I'd like to say the crying drawings are more artistic liberties, but they aren't. Looking back, it seems like we fought constantly, and always about the same thing: the nature of our relationship. Being the non-pants wearer, I was always demanding more commitment. Gabriela, pants prominently displayed, was fresh off a complicated four-year marriage and wanted more freedom. The concept of a "green-light" was broached several times. She wanted the ability to see other people, but remain with me. On several occasions — most notably during the now-infamous L-train crying jag — the idea of an open relationship reduced me to tears. "Ryan Crying on the L Train" depicts my neck and chin next to the window of a subway car. Like in the others, my face is mostly obscured. I like to think the exclusion of my face from Gabriela's work makes me a consummate everyman: well-endowed, pushover, non-pants-wearer, crybaby.
So, back to Star Trek. The great thing about dating foreign women is they don't have the same prejudices about sci-fi that many American girls seem to have. To Gabriela, Star Trek was just one more part of our weird, monolithic pop-culture. "Ryan Telling Me a Star Treck Episode From Start to Finish" is a cute illustration of this aspect of our time together. She misspelled the word "Trek" — I didn't have the heart to tell her, and the piece was accepted with the others by the gallery regardless. Later, she was profoundly offended that I hadn't alerted her to the error, and hastily drew a new one. The drawing itself was another one of the side of my face, this time on a pillow. Which episode was I telling her about? I'd given her the rundown of several, so it's hard to say. I like to think I was telling her about the episode in which William Shatner tells Joan Collins that in the future, a poet would recommend replacing the phrase "I love you" with "Let me help."
Before I get to the part where our relationship disintegrates, it's important to highlight one more drawing from The Ryan Series. It's not Gabriela's favorite, but I'm pretty sure it's mine. Being a thin guy who wears women's jeans because they fit better means I'm frequently the same weight as many women I've fallen in love with. Having a thirty-inch waist and kabob-skewer arms doesn't make me the kind of guy who can scoop up a girl and whisk her away. But Gabriela is tiny, and the drawing "Ryan Carrying Me Across The Street" captures this. It's two simple, diagonal, intersecting lines. It doesn't indicate which streets we were on, but it was somewhere in Soho. We had just seen Woody Allen's Manhattan at the Film Forum. Idealism, youth and love will occasionally combine to create memorable moments like this. I picked her up and carried her to the restaurant, where we had a late dinner.
The breakup had been in the mail for a while, and finally arrived when she kissed someone else. I was visibly devastated, an opportunity that provided her a bit more material: "Ryan Crying One More Time," and "Cry Ryan Cry." We agreed to spend a period of time apart before trying to be friends. The night we broke up she sent an email to my roommate that said, "Please take care of him now." He and I promptly got drunk and watched Star Trek IV, the one with the whales.
It was a spring breakup, and as Hemingway says at the beginning of A Moveable Feast, "When the false spring came, there was nothing to worry about except where to be happiest." We moved on. I dated someone else. She dated someone else. We had brunch a few times. Some of these meals were nice, some of them were miserable. When someone becomes a ghost, it's hard to incorporate them back into your life as a tangible person. And in this case, there was a whole body of publicly displayed artwork out there to remind us of who we had been. There were moments when we thought we could never be friends. Being asked to leave one of her shows in Greenpoint after I drunkenly accosted her new boyfriend comes to mind.
But somehow we endured as friends, and we did so in the typical way: by helping each other. In the summer, Gabriela decided to go to Berlin to properly shop around some of her work, a two-month trip that coincided with her lease ending. She needed a place to store her stuff, and as it happened, I had a large basement at my apartment in Flatbush. She brought it all over. Among these items was, of course, "White Bread." We exchanged a little laugh as she handed me the plastic bag covering the painting, and in many ways, our friendship was forever secured in that moment.
Gabriela doesn't do large-scale canvas work anymore. She gave up her studio, and now focuses on small drawings in the same style as The Ryan Series. This style of work has gained her notoriety in both New York and Germany.
Very recently, I was in her new apartment in Greenpoint, having dinner and catching up. "How do you two know each other?" her roommate asked. I assumed Gabriela would tell her we're old friends or we dated briefly or something. Instead, she said, "Ryan totally changed the way I make my art. He's the reason I've had any success."
Over some whiskey, we talked. She said it seemed like I was in a good place, and I said I was. We didn't need anything from each other anymore. But I still harbor a perverse fantasy that Gabriela's career will continue to grow, and years from now a future girlfriend will look at my naked body and tell me it reminds her of this drawing she saw at a gallery. Except for the penis. n°
©2008 Ryan Britt and hooksexup.com