2007-01-20
penguin paperweights
I keep thinking about the Art Manifesto that I found on the ground. I carry it in my backpack and read it when I get sleepy in class. I've never met an art teacher who didn't bore me with stupid projects.
In elementary school, Mrs. Anderson made us sketch intersecting train tracks with foot-long metal rulers. She gave me a C- because my lines looked wobbly instead of straight. I couldn't keep them still, no matter how hard I tried.
Next we moved on to paper-mache replicas of snack bags. I didn't mind the first step: mixing strips of newspaper into a soup of watery glue. When Mrs. Anderson saw the crooked letter "S" I'd painted on my pillow-sized bag of Snickers, she told me to do it over again. I wasted time, dabbing impressionistic blobs of Hooker Green on my sneakers. The unfinished Snickers bag sat on the back shelf with Mrs. Anderson's dried up pots of who-knows-what: nubby pencils, broken twigs, clippings from National Geographic used for "inspiration." Her classroom reminded me of a flea market.
We tried silk-screening (I messed up so badly, the colors in my cityscape bled off the page by half an inch, making it seem like a 3-D cartoon, minus the magic glasses). We painted black-and-white photographs with Q-tips dipped in oil paint. I preferred green skies, pink pine trees, and a red ocean boiling beneath the clouds.
Mrs. Anderson said it wasn't realistic. Why couldn't I color inside the lines? She glanced at my signature on the back of the photograph and said, "You write like a boy."
I wanted to tell her, "You sound like one." (She had a crunchy voice from yelling at us all day). When I sat in English class next door, I could hear Mrs. Anderson screaming at her students. My friend, Justin, said she needed medication.
Sometimes I would stare at her watercolor paintings, which she hung above her desk: smeary orchids that looked like exploding volcanoes. I wonder if she'd wanted to be an artist when she grew up. Instead, she got stuck teaching us how to draw turkeys by tracing our hands.
When we graduated to clay, she told us to punch holes in our coffee mugs and ashtrays. Otherwise they would burst in the kiln. (I gritted my teeth every time she said, "kiln.") I pictured my lopsided soup bowl spontaneously combusting...a big bang that would taken down the other kids' junk like some kind of karma.
Mrs. Anderson wanted us to paint our lumpy paperweights like birds. I glanced across the room at rows of blue jays and robins. I grabbed a jar of black paint and dipped my brush into it. My paperweight was now a penguin. I saw Mrs. Anderson waddling down the aisle. She leaned over my shoulder and said nothing.
On my report card, she gave me an A.
f-i-n at 10:07 a.m.