The Art of Art

            Back when I was a kid in school I fancied myself fairly artistic. Use to think one day I’d grow up and get to draw pretty pictures for Disney and be super rich and super famous. This idea came from The Lion King. Our VHS version came with this long introduction with how they made the movie. Elton John sang at the piano and blah blah blahed about the music. The directors would go on forever about I don’t even know what. Then the artists would be shown, and they weren’t just sitting around quietly drawing pictures. They got to play with lions. Lions! I wanted to have a job where I got to hang out with lions. So when I got to High School I went into Studio Art.
            We didn’t get to play with lions. Or warthogs. Or toucans. We mainly sat around and drew boxes. We would spend a solid month, everyday going to class and drawing boxes. And not different and creative boxes, the same box. The same brown, perfectly square box, from the same angle. I still have nightmares about sitting in a room and staring at a box. It never moves, it doesn’t come to life. It just sits there and I have to stare at it, and draw it. Eventually after a year we graduated to other objects like, a pen, a book, a bottle, and the most exciting thing, a dead bee. A dead bee.  Let that sink in. 20 high school students sat in a room and drew a dead bee every day for a month. Where were my lions?
            I ended up giving up hope and dropped out of the art program for my junior year. Which turned out to be like when you step into another line at the grocery store and the line you were originally in suddenly disappears. I would walk by the art wing everyday on my way to class and see these stunning art work pieces. There were beautiful landscapes, realistic drawings of the school hallways, and even really cool art sculptures. So I snuck back in line for my senior year.
            By now the craze for abstract art had hit the high school. I’m talking about pieces that look like a five year old had been handed a crayon and told to go crazy, but are deeply meaningful because the hectic lines and dramatic contrasting colors represent the inner suffering of the artist and his raging war against society. Me, being a 17 year old high school student had no inner conflict. The worst thing that had ever happened to me was algebra. Hard to create deep and meaningful abstract art about hating 2x-4ab÷5cx + 95 = bananas. So I was the five year old who had been handed a crayon and told to go crazy.
            I would usually sit in class and plop paint on canvas. Dark reds, blues, purples, and black to make it seem like I was working out deep angsty feelings of rage. Course I sat with all my friends who did the same thing and we would create a ruckus making fun of each other’s blobs of paint and hectic lines of despair. Eventually we caught the art teacher’s eye and she floated over to examine our art work. She examined my friend Mia’s work.
            “How beautiful, I love the blending of orange, red, and black, it’s like the soul’s inner fire.”
            “I can see a face!” I pointed out. “Looks like an Indian man!”
            “Oh yeah” Mia caught on “I’m painting about the suffering of the Native American people against the pale face strangers.”
            Knowing Mia had been splotching on paint like the rest of us, we all dissolved into sniggers. The teacher crinkled her nose distastefully.
            “You’re not supposed to see anything. It’s just supposed to be colors and lines. You’ll have to rework it so you can’t see any images.”
            She then glanced over at mine irritated and said “You need more yellow.”
            She stormed off to the other side of the room to be with the truly artist people who could tap into their hatred of math and create authentic abstract art. We went back to plopping paint, Mia made sure to make her Indian man go away and I added blots of yellow. 20 minutes later the teacher circled back to us. She looked down at my painting and gasped.
            “Who told you to put yellow in there?”
            “You did?”
            “No I didn’t. You need to fix this.” She glanced over at Mia’s. “I liked it better earlier.”
            Once she had gone Mia and I desperately tried to reverse our efforts, but it’s hard to reverse paint splotches. By the end of class we managed it. They both were looking soggy and runny by this point but sort of back to normal. The teacher looked them over.
            “You’re going to have to rework them next class. Mia, I still see the Indian man, and Christina you need more yellow.”
            There was no “winning” in this class. We spent the rest of the month working on our paintings before we moved on to abstract self-portraits.  After months of that we created abstract sculptures representing whatever beef we had with society. By the end of the year I gave up dreaming about drawing lions with Elton John. I went to college for English. There I ended up having to take a fine arts class to full a core requirement. I took Drawing 1, where I drew boxes. Lots and lots of boxes.