There is a difference, some might say, between being a painter and being an artist.
American painter Emma Dial is both. She's an art school grad in her early 30s with a penchant for greasy street food, chocolate bars and cigarettes. She picks her toenails with a palette knife. Typically dressed in a navy turtleneck and dark men's trousers, she has prematurely silver hair, the color drained like a blank canvas. Emma is fiercely talented, "the next one to watch" according to colleagues; but American painter Emma Dial has not painted in years. Not for herself, anyway.
Instead, Emma has spent the better part of a decade as devoted studio assistant to famous New York painter Michael Freiburg, an egotistical, womanizing virtuoso who habitually punctuates sentences by making quotation marks in the air. Emma preps his canvases, mixes his paint, applies her signature intricate brushwork to his signature large-scale canvases. It's a thankless existence in which Emma spends 18-hour stretches alone in Michael's studio, following instructions he's scribbled on Post-its, nestled atop rickety scaffolding while perfecting his work. She is caged, physically and creatively.
"Perched four feet in the air, a row of warm incandescent lights over my head and the remains of a cheese sandwich at my knees, I felt like a pet bird," Emma tells us. Atelier culture is very much alive in Samantha Peale's contemporary New York art world. (It's fertile ground, and Peale goes at it with more than a few satirical jabs in her novel "The American Painter Emma Dial.") However Emma's job isn't without its charms: At the epicenter of a power circle of artists, she has access, credibility and a healthy dose of glamour. Instant career gratification.
But Emma's life is also predictably vapid, laced with self-loathing and doubt. She hasn't visited her studio in months and purposefully squelches her creative urges so that there's time to realize Michael's. Their relationship is without boundaries in every way. Emma does a perfect imitation of her boss and expertly forges his signature; they have sex regularly because, as Michael explains, it connects them and she's better able to realize his vision. It's ultimate enmeshing: The day job, originally meant to fuel Emma's art, usurps it. Her strategic means to an end becomes the destination.
