RafaelFajardo

The art units at my elementary school were even emptier than the music units. They were like recess periods held indoors. Art, the way my teachers introduced it, wasn’t really a subject as math and science were, but a state of mind. Achieving this state required glue and scissors, sometimes glitter, occasionally bits of yarn, and long stretches of silence. Art was a form of stillness, dull and peaceful, and yet we were urged to approach it with great excitement, as though enduring boredom and immobility liberated what was best in people.

“What’s that thing?” my father asked me one afternoon. It was November, well into the school year, and my art teacher was pushing a new line: that art, to be good, should show emotion. This contradicted her old line: that art was good no matter what.

“It started out,” I said, “as a triceratops charging a stegosaurus that you can’t see except for the tip of its snout there at the edge, under the boulders shooting from the volcano.”

“So how come it didn’t say all that?”

“My teacher.”

“What about her?”

“She told me to open up.”

“Open up in what respect?”

“By showing forms instead of objects.”

“The distinction there being…?”

“All I know,” I said, “is what she told me. It’s true that I draw good dinosaurs, she said, but drawing things that look like other things —things that we have pictures of already— isn’t really art, it’s copying. Art is feelings. She wants me to draw feelings. That’s what those squiggles are. Those wavy parts.”

My father nodded. Then he went hunting. In a pipe in the wall I could hear the water draining from my mother’s bath upstairs. To spare her the awkwardness and insincerity of having to show pride in my botched picture, I crumpled it up and stuffed it in my corduroys, where it stayed hidden until laundry day.

“What’s this?” my mother said.

“Some art I made.”

“I love it.”

“Why?”

“It’s different.”

“Than what?” I said.

“Than what you usually do. There’s something new here.”

“Feelings.”

“Is that it? Huh. I think you’re right.”

That’s when, art-wise, I became a fraud. With the pure, uncorrupted logic which God grants eight-year-olds, I reasoned that if art was made of feelings and feelings were secret, known only to the artist, then art could be anything you said it was. Collage by collage, tempera by tempera, I practiced producing mysterious oddities to which I could attach invented feelings. My stories about my art became my art. “This decoupage is about how sad I get when my father leaves on a long business trip.” “This watercolor shows my happiness when it snows and I can use my sled.” These stories brought praise and sometimes hugs, eventually convincing me that art was about one feeling above all others: being loved. Or wanting to be loved. And once I discovered this, I got straight A’s.