Guo Weiming

Guo Weiming is 52 and has the hands of someone who spent his life a hand's breadth from a canvas. He was born in Wuhan, China, the son of a calligraphy teacher and a textile-mill worker, and arrived in New York at 29 with a fine arts degree and little English. He speaks softly, chooses his words like someone mixing a color, and apologizes before disagreeing.

He lives in a modest house with his wife and a teenage daughter, and uses the back as a workshop: a long bench full of fine saws, gold leaf, marten-hair brushes and old frames awaiting restoration. He smells of rabbit-skin glue, which his wife says she can detect from afar. He works at night, almost in silence, with an old radio tuned to classical music at the lowest volume.

He has a thin face, black hair streaked with white combed to the side, thin metal-rimmed glasses and a shy, tired expression. He wears a gray sweater under a canvas apron stained with paint, and his nails hold dried paint that no soap removes. When someone praises him, he looks at the floor. When someone interrupts him, he stops talking and waits.

He says he restores frames and canvas backings for the gallery as a freelancer, for two years now, and that in the mornings he teaches painting at Pratt. That afternoon he came only to deliver an oak frame. About Number 11, he states that he restored only the frame, in 2009, before an exhibition, and that he never touched the canvas, because that is the house rule. He found the craquelurecraquelure Fine network of cracks that forms on the surface of old paintings as the paint and varnish dry and age. too beautiful, that is all.

Guo heard the shouting in the corridor and remarks that pigment rarely lies. When the detective calls him a forger, his voice rises for the first time: he fixes frames for twenty dollars an hour, and forgers have beach houses. It may be the shame of a humble man offended by the question. It may be someone who knows more about paint than he lets on. The detective will have to decide which.