“Art gotta be high up and dangerous,” the graffiti artist tells his mother. It has to be practiced diligently like playing the piano, the longtime members of a life drawing studio believe, and if your view of the model is the model’s backside, you don’t move for a better view. Art is a mysterious way into your model’s sorrow when words fail. Art can open the rooms of your childhood. It existed before there was perspective. It can even be a dinner party. It can make a still life come alive, and it can heal a wounded spirit.

Barbara de la Cuesta taught and worked as a journalist in South America. She now teaches Spanish.

Her novel, The Spanish Teacher, was winner of the Gival Press Fiction Prize.

About her most recent novel, Adam’s Chair, Lauren Stafford, of the Manhattan Review of Books, wrote:

“A tapestry of literary elegance… A contemporary novel for the ages.”