You've got a nice one. Is that your studio over there?"

"Yep."

"Could I ask you a question?"

"Sure."

"What is art, anyway?" Hendrik raised his eyebrows. He took several
long swallows of Heineken. "I've met a lot of artists in this town,"
Patrick went on, "and I realized that I don't understand it."

"Bunch of bullshit, mostly."

Patrick waited. Hendrik looked at him and sighed. He took another
swallow of Heineken and indicated the valley with one hand. "Everybody
wants to be an artist," he said. "Doctors. I saw a clinic the other
day--said 'Medical Arts Group' on the building." He burped. "It's like
this, Patrick: there's art, capital A--fine art, it's called
sometimes--and there's everything else."

"So what is this 'fine art?"'

Hendrik shook his head. He went into the house and came out with two
more beers. "Let's start with everything else," he said. "It's easier."
He pried off the bottle caps. "Everything else is commercial
art--calendar graphics or posters or paintings of lighthouses, fall
foliage, the streets of Paris--that kind of stuff, done in familiar
styles. Nothing wrong with it. But it isn't art; it's craft." He drank.
"It's craft because the painters know what they're doing when they
start. Some of the paintings seem magical, but it's trick magic. They
know how to get the rabbit out of the hat. An artist--capital
A--doesn't know what's in the hat or how to get it out."

"Hmm," Patrick said.

"A guy in Vermont came up with that comparison--Robert Francis. It's
like this, Patrick: an artist needs to make a picture that expresses
how he feels about something or someone or some place. Since every
artist is different, good paintings, true paintings, are original."

"True?"

"Yeah, true to the artist's feelings," Hendrik said.

"True," Patrick said, turning the word over in his mind.

"It's not so easy. What the hell, I'll show you." Hendrik got up and
led Patrick to his studio.

"Look there," he said, pointing at a wall covered with charcoal
drawings of a nude Julie Van Slyke, fifteen years younger. "Those are
studies I made before I did the painting. You can see how I kept
circling around the central idea, this line here." He moved one hand
through the air as though he were stroking her hip. "Once I got it
right, it was mostly a matter of color. Not a bad painting, as it
turned out."

Patrick saw what Hendrik meant through a light haze of embarrassment.
He took a drink from his bottl