{"id":11553,"date":"2015-09-20T19:43:14","date_gmt":"2015-09-20T19:43:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/the-art-units-at-my-elementary-school-were-even-2\/"},"modified":"2015-09-20T19:43:14","modified_gmt":"2015-09-20T19:43:14","slug":"the-art-units-at-my-elementary-school-were-even-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/the-art-units-at-my-elementary-school-were-even-2\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s that thing?\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt started out,\u201d I said, \u201cas a triceratops charging a stegosaurus that you can\u2019t see except for the tip of its snout there at the edge, under the boulders shooting from the volcano.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSo how come it didn\u2019t say all that?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMy teacher.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat about her?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cShe told me to open up.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOpen up in what respect?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBy showing forms instead of objects.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe distinction there being\u2026?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAll I know,\u201d I said, \u201cis what she told me. It\u2019s true that I draw good dinosaurs, she said, but drawing things that look like other things \u2014things that we have pictures of already\u2014 isn\u2019t really art, it\u2019s copying. Art is feelings. She wants me to draw feelings. That\u2019s what those squiggles are. Those wavy parts.\u201d<\/p>\n

My father nodded. Then he went hunting. In a pipe in the wall I could hear the water draining from my mother\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s this?\u201d my mother said.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome art I made.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI love it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy?\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s different.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThan what?\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThan what you usually do. There\u2019s something new here.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFeelings.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIs that it? Huh. I think you\u2019re right.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s 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. \u201cThis decoupage is about how sad I get when my father leaves on a long business trip.\u201d \u201cThis watercolor shows my happiness when it snows and I can use my sled.\u201d 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\u2019s.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

excerpted from <\/p>\n

Lost In The Meritocracy<\/i><\/p>\n

, 2009, <\/p>\n

Walter Kirn<\/b><\/p>\n

(via penonomen<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Very interesting anecdote. I think it would take a while for me to parse and interpret it.<\/p>\n

(via notational<\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019t 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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","category-words","post_format-post-format-quote"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-30l","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11553\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}