In Ashbery’s sestina “The Painter,” the reader first finds the titular character “Sitting between the sea and the buildings” (Line 1). Before any action or characterization is introduced, the artist is firmly located in a liminal space—caught between the ineffable sea and the society of “the buildings” (Line 1). The painter “enjoy[s] painting the sea’s portrait” (Line 2), though he approaches the project with childlike “prayer” (Line 3). Instead of painting in the conventional sense, the artist “expect[s]” (Line 4) the sea to paint itself, to “rush up the sand” and “seiz[e] a brush” (Line 5). Despite the painter’s own enjoyment of this artistic practice, its failure to produce “any paint on his canvas” (Line 7) disturbs the people in the buildings around him.

An artistic practice that does not produce tangible art is, for the building dwellers, unacceptable. For this reason, they “[p]ut [the painter] to work,” encouraging him to use “the brush / As a means to an end” (Lines 9-10). So far, the painter has approached his art as a practice whose value his inherent. Now, he is pushed to understand practice as a means of producing a concrete product.