after years in the studio slinging lead.
“Why don’t you just give someone else the instructions,” her gallerist had once urged. “We’ll help you hire them, you’d probably make more money in the end. It would definitely speed up production time.”
She didn’t need the money—her career, her wife’s, the inheritance, it was fine, really. She didn’t need to make things, put on shows, to make a living. Why’d she keep exhibiting? she often wondered when indulging sullen moods.
The critic had asked her whether she’d used studio assistants as well. She said hiring others made her feel uncomfortable, that there was honesty in her hand. He asked if she cooked her own food, did her own laundry, managed her own finances, installed her own work, etc., etc., and her impulse was to retort that it was none of his business but it seemed to her perhaps he was none too different from her handyman or accountant or the intern who had gotten her café au lait, devising a way for her art to be seen and sold, shoveling words to prop it up, or, as the case could be, tear it down, not that people wrote things so mean anymore. Well, except about artists like her, the old guard now, she realized.
