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Show 159 rhythm-and-blues station, the speaker-button discreetly plugged into his left ear. He left the building only to attend his other classes, and hurried right back to resume work before his brushes had dried. Something like an obsession seemed to haunt Harry's work. He worked without reference to anything in the room, whether one of the still-lifes set up in front of the blackboard for the mixed-media and beginning oil classes, or the changing cast of models brought in each afternoon for the figure classes, during which the doors were locked and the blackout curtains drawn over the windows, separating Harry from important sketches and forcing him to overcorrect in accommodating his color to artificial light. No, whatever Harry worked from was visible to no one else but stood in some thicket accessible only to his inner eye and peered out between branches and vines, stirring only at intervals and snapping twigs with her foot. In practice, that is, on canvas, or masonite or tagboard or butcher paper-he switched media constantly-this translated into violent portraits, or rather the same violent portrait revised endlessly. She took form through slashes of whites and pinks separating out from slashes of blacks and browns and greens. Where several slashes terminated, an upper lip curled perpendicularly, exposing slashes of teeth. Where shorter slashes of white and brown cohered, muddy eyes glared out over red lids. Nostrils, sometimes more than two, were torn into whatever space remained below, sometimes pulling the lip, as though by fishhooks, to join the scar of a septum between them. Harry's brushstrokes were not always on the mark when the fit was on him, and strings of flesh flew past the body's contours and tangled with slashes of costume and vine at the edges of the composition. Sometimes fingers emerged from these over-reaches, gripping rags, their knuckles scarred white. Always, though, the movement returned the viewer to the ruined face, the lip pulled up or torn away to expose teeth, the eyes spread wide to |