Crayons

 

 

This place sure is dusty, he thought.  It's damp.  Maybe that makes sense.  They do clay sculpting here.  What doesn't make sense is this place is so dark.  They keep the art room in the basement, where there's only a few small windows, and then the teacher keeps his plants in the window, blocking most of what little light there was to begin with.  "I bet you noticed by now that I like plants.  I always have to be surrounded by vegetation."  That was the first thing the teacher said as soon as all the students sat down.  Peter was idly glancing at the ledges holding the plants, even before the teacher had said anything, and he vaguely noticed that those ledges seemed to be too small to hold them.  This not making sense, he shifted his gaze to look at some of the pictures on the wall.  The art teacher confessed that he himself was the author in each of the cases.  "Look at them so you can get an idea of what I'm like."  Peter thought, how can a piece of art tell you what a person's like?  He thought teachers usually put up the kids' work, to show they were proud.  Not this one.  Maybe that's how I'll know what he's like: no students' art.  The art class at Peter's last school was in a barn, so this might have been a step up.  There was no heat there, and when it snowed, everybody went sledding instead.

The boy next to him whacked Peter on the arm, and he looked. "Hey," the other boy whispered.  "Do you think he's gay?"  Peter shrugged.  "I bet he is."  The teacher didn't hear that, though Peter was afraid he would.  He just kept talking about his hobbies and interests.  Maybe he is.

He looked back.  The boy was Hemingway, but Peter couldn't remember his first name.  He only remembered his last name, because--well, because it was "Hemingway".  At the orientation the week before, Peter was with his father, and they sat down to lunch at a bench next to the boy.

Hemingway grunted hello shyly.  However, he looked like a bully.

"Do you mind if we sit here?  Or did you have an appointment with somebody important.  Maybe a power lunch with Donald Trump?"  His father was trying to be funny.

"No.  I don't care if you sit here."

Peter looked into his lunch bag, and his father continued talking:  "This is Peter."

"Hi, I'm [something something] Hemingway," and he extended his hand as Peter's father did.  Why's he trying to make friends for me, Peter thought.

"Oh, are you related to Ernest?"

"Huh?  What's that mean?  I hear that a lot."

"The writer," Peter's father said.  "You know, Ernest Hemingway?"

“No.”

 

"Now take a look at this one," the art teacher said.  "I did this one, ah, a couple of years ago.  But I want you to notice two things.  Uh, you, what's your name?"

"Maria."

"Maria, what do you notice about this picture?"

She peered.  "It's got a lot of triangles.  And rectangles."

"Right.  Yes it does have a lot of triangles and rectangles."  Hemingway looked at Peter as if to say, "duhh. . ."

"It's not about anything," someone else called out.

The teacher redirected his attention.  "What do you mean, 'It's not about anything'?"

"Well, it's not something you'd see in real life, like it's not a picture of a tree, or a house."

"Good.  And what do we call that kind of art?"

Someone said, "Abstract?"

"No, it's just the opposite of abstract."  Peter raised his hand.  "Yes--"

"It's 'representational'."

"Good.  And that's part of one of the things I want you to notice about this picture.  The point is not to draw an accurate landscape, or still life, or portrait.  The focus of this is color: the feeling of the color.  You'll notice that these figures," he pointed to a yellow one, then an orange one in the foreground, "are warm; they have a sense of heat about them, and as you go back, you see red, then some greens, and finally some purples and blues, which get progressively cooler." 

Hemingway leaned over again.  "How did you know that?"  Peter was trying to listen to the teacher and he didn't want to answer this question, but he whispered back, "I've just heard of it before." 

"Another thing I want you to notice is the sense of depth.  Of all these shapes," the teacher said, running his finger around the paper on the wall to demonstrate, "which of them seems closest to you?  Which of them could be popping off of the paper?"

A girl sitting beneath a spider plant raised her hand.

"Yes, what's your name?"

"Carol."

"Carol, which seems closest?"

"That one, that yellow triangle in front."

"It's in front.  Why do you say that?"

"Well, because yellow is the warmest color, it's the sharpest, just as whatever is closest to us in our vision."

"Right.  Exactly.  Good.  Did everyone hear that?" and he looked around.  Peter didn't quite understand, and he glanced over at Hemingway, who seemed to be just as confused.  Yellow is the warmest color?  It's the sharpest?  What does that mean?

Then a boy in the far corner, whom Peter could not see, spoke up: "Wait, I have a question."

"Yes, what is it?"

"Now, you see behind the yellow triangle, there's a green rectangle?"

"This one," the art teacher pointed out.

"Yes.  Well that rectangle starts on one side of the triangle, and then it goes out to the other side of the triangle, too.  So we know that the yellow triangle is overlapping the green rectangle.  And there are other overlapping shapes, also.  Now, as you go back, you made the colors cooler and darker, like they're in the shadows, but you could just as well have made those shapes in the background red or orange."  He waited to see if the teacher understood.

"So you're saying the warmer colors overlap the cooler ones, so they must be in front."

"Yeah."

Then the teacher turned toward Carol.  "But if we were to make one of these background shapes a warmer color, would that still work?  Would it still be in the background?"

Carol said, "No," and shook her head.  The teacher held her glance for a couple of moments.  "No.  You're right."

Well that doesn't make sense, Peter thought.  If I see a yellow school bus on the other side of the street, and a blue car on this side of the street, I know that the blue car is in front, because it's smaller and because it blocks some of my view of the bus.  I don't think the bus looks closer because it's yellow.  How come nobody else is saying anything?  Do they agree with him?

He looked at Hemingway. "What the hell is he even talking about?"

Hemingway said, "I think he’s saying the warmer colors look closer because they're sharper."

And why are we bothering to be so particular about abstract art?  What difference does it make if there's a yellow triangle, or an orange circle or a purple pentagon?

"Okay," the art teacher said, moving quickly on to business.  "If you'll all line up by this shelf, take three pieces of the paper on the top shelf (don't use the glossy paper) and one box of pastels.  I want you all to focus on trying to achieve a sense of depth with your colors, warm in front, cooler as you go back.  You don't have to use shapes with straight edges, like I did, but don't make it representational.  This is not supposed to be about anything.  Oh!  Please hold up."  He looked around, waiting for the students' attention.  "Everybody look up here for a minute," he said in front of the same picture.  I want you all to notice something else about this."  Peter was already looking, because he was still in line for paper.  The teacher looked for a second at Carol, who was seated in his line of vision.  "When you look at this picture, where does it lead your eyes?"  He waited for anyone to say something, but it was still Carol.  "The yellow triangle."  And once again it was the yellow triangle.  "Okay.  I'm not really concerned at this point with why your attention is drawn to that part of the picture.  I just want to say that when you create a focal point in your picture, it is very important where on the page your eyes are drawn.  First of all, you don't want to draw the focus toward the edge, because then your viewers will be looking at the wall.  But then again, you don't want the focus to be right in the middle of the page either, because that. . .that will make the piece too obvious, too simple.  The best place for a focal point is somewhere toward the middle, but not on the vertical or horizontal median."  These were two more things you couldn’t do.  You couldn't make a left turn from the right hand lane.  You couldn't pass a school bus.  Especially a triangular one.

 

Peter found that most of the pastels in his box were missing.  Many of them were just stubs.  Working alongside Hemingway, he found that he was frequently requesting to use the other's colors.

"What's the matter?" Hemingway asked, "didn't you get a box of crayons?"

"Pastels."

"Whatever." 

Peter showed him the box:  "It was the last one."

"Oh yeah, I remember that one.  I almost took it.  But then I looked inside and saw how crappy it was.  I had to look through like three--five boxes to get a good one."

"I don't even have a red," Peter observed.

"So, just use what you got.  You don't need red, anyway, unless you're drawing a sports car.  Oh wait, we're not supposed to draw anything.  Hey, what are we supposed to do?"  Hemingway said "hey" a lot, Peter noticed.

"We're supposed to achieve a sense of depth with the colors."

"Oh right.” He tilted his face cogitatively at the far, dark corner of the room.  “Hey," (there again)  "what are you drawing?"

"I don't know yet.  I'm still trying to decide what I can do with this box of pastels."

Hemingway said, "You know, you can share mine.  I was only joking before.  I'm not going to beat you up if you use my red."  That was it:  he did look like a bully.  I suppose he realized he did.  Big, oafish body.  Big oafish head, too.  Trying to overcome that rough, drawlish, bullying appearance.  What was it?  Peter looked at him.  His hair's too short for his head.  It makes his head look too big.  Hemingway ripped up the paper he had been working on, not noticing that Peter was watching him.  He really seems concerned about getting this picture right.

"Hey," Hemingway suddenly said.  "Do you know the new Corvette out?"  Perhaps he was more concerned with the red sports car.

"I know Corvette."

"I mean the new one, the ZR1."

"Yeah."

"I'm gonna get one."

"Yeah, right.  You're 13 years old."

"I'm 14.  That's only two years till I get my driver's license.  My dad's gonna buy one, and I'm going to pay for it after two years."

"With what?"

"I have a job landscaping.  I make fifteen dollars an hour."

"I thought you had to be 16 years old to have a job."

"Yeah well it's, what do you call it?  Under the table.  So I don't have to pay taxes, either." 

"Keep dreaming."  But maybe he was right.  There were many rich, spoiled kids at this school.  I probably won't have a car till I'm thirty.  Peter, last in line again.  Hemingway didn't say anything.  Peter was a little worried that he had insulted him.  Now who's the bully?  Your meekness punches hard to overcome its image.  He's really concentrating now.  Good, now I can do some work.  Twenty minutes to the end of class.  And the teacher wanted to talk about the paintings afterward.  Did we "achieve" that sense of depth we were looking for?  Were we really looking for it?  I bet whatshername found it.  Maria.  No, it was the other girl.  "That's what's good about being at this last table.  The teacher kind of forgets about you.  You can do what you want."  Hemingway didn't respond.  Wow, he must have really offended him.  Okay, okay.  Work.  Peter didn't have to say that, anyway.  What do you have.  Um, um, um: yellow, the first pastel he picked up.  Then holding it for awhile, to decide if that was the color he really wanted, he kept it; it didn't seem important.  Won't do a triangle, though.  Peter drew a yellow slash diagonally through the page.  He wasn't bold enough for the darker colors he had.  Blue, brown.  What's white for?  Fill the whole page, but some of it might be filled with emptiness.  So why did he have to start filling it up in the first place?  There's no sense of depth in nothing.  But the slash.  The slash provided a nice contrast between nothing and something.  Contrast is like depth.  Slash!  Breaks forth.  Dividing all which is left.  It dominates the entire page.  Domination.

What they said in the basketball commercials, "In your face!"  "Domination."  In your face.  So there was a sense of closeness, hence a sense of depth.  Where did it lead?  Slash down to the lower right, right off the page.  Focus.  Peter looks at the wall and sees, barely, through the window above, a boy's sneakers walking through the soccer field.  Indoor soccer shoes.  Those fancy leather black ones with the long tongues.  The long tongues are what make them fashionable.  The boy was probably let out of class early and was waiting for a parent to pick him up.  They usually didn't play soccer in them, but they went well with the pants most of the boys wore, baggy but clipped in tight, somehow, toward the ankles.  Focus.

Do another one.  Peter drew out the brown, to make another shape behind the yellow one.  He didn't realize that it would be difficult to make a large, blocky shape seem like it was behind a thin, yellow stripe, regardless of whether it was drawn first or second.  But maybe that was the trick, to provide sense of depth without overlapping, and answer the question:  was the teacher really bee-essing the students?  He paused then, because he didn't know if brown was a warm or a cool color.  He turned to Hemingway. "How warm is brown?  How can you tell?"

"Well, if you can see steam coming off of it, it's warm.  Hahahaha, ha.  Get it?"  He struck Peter with his elbow.  Evidently, he hadn't taken that previous comment too much to heart.  A brown blob, right in the middle.  That'll settle him.  The arbitrary, abstract (though not to Hemingway) brown blotch smack dab in the middle.  Now what was wrong with that?  This is all about a school bus carrying kids to a new school on their first day.  Though the seats are crammed with anxiety and conversation, there is no real depth to the friendships formed.  Peter looked at the drawing.  See, that's not too obvious.

"Hey, that's good," Hemingway said.

"What, I only drew two shapes."

"Yeah, but the way they are together on the page."  Peter looked at the way the shapes sat.  He didn't see it.  Evidently something as mysterious as the teacher's babble brewed in Hemingway's own mind.  Whose mind was obvious?  Whose mind was a brown blotch in the center of the page?  Oh yeah, Peter's was.  Everyone saw Peter's mind, glancing at the last one in line for paper, stuck with the crappy box.  Everybody could see the sincerity of that pathetic brown blotch.  "It doesn't mean anything."  Right; no one knew what it meant.  Just forms, the texture of crayons.  Peter looked over at Hemingway's paper and saw a similar design.  Too obvious.  Too much a crayon-like texture.  The teacher wouldn't like that, but Peter didn't know why.  Same simpleness in Hemingway’s.  Peter said, "Your's is just the same, what do you mean?"

"Yeah, you're right, they are kind of the same.  Somehow it doesn't look like the teacher's though."

"We use our own shapes."

"No, it's not that.  His looks, like, more solid."

"Yeah, ours just looks like crans."

"What?"

"I said it looks like crans."

"Haha, that's not how you say it.  It's not 'crans', it's 'cray-ons'."

"No it isn't.  Hey, do you think I've achieved a sense of depth?"

"No," said Hemingway, "but it still looks good."

"All right.  Give me that red.  I'm going to achieve some red now."  Not too far in the corner.  Red swoop over the shoulder of the yellow slash.  Well, now he's gonna say it looks like a rainbow.  Peter was getting a hang of this.  At least his pace was picking up a bit.  Among the colors he proceeded to draw, there now seemed to be a sense of harmony.  Perhaps not a depth--the colors weren't dense enough to provide that, anyway.  Peter was simply comfortable with the positioning of random shapes and colors bounded by the rectangular paper.  Well, they weren't random, but arbitrary rather.  Which is what made them his own shapes, no straight edges.  Perhaps that was what made him feel a bit comfortable for the moment.  His own shapes, and borders, working at a consistent rhythm, and hopefully Hemingway wouldn't be talking for much of the rest of the class.  And his own texture, too, of crayons.  They weren't as solid as the teacher's forms, but he felt it didn't have to be an exact copy of the teacher's, although he would still probably pick on it.  He wondered if those ideas of depth would still apply with such foggy, arbitrary colors.

"Pete, do we have to fill up the whole page?"

"I don’t care.  It's almost time to leave, anyway.  If he really wants us to finish, he'll give us time to work on it tomorrow."

 

The students lined up seated against the wall in the hallway after they tacked up their pictures on the wall.  Then Hemingway said, "Pete, I think ours are the best, don't you?"

"Actually, I think they're kind of lame."

"What do you mean?"

"Well look at them, there's nothing in them."

"The shapes are good."

"I don't think he cares about the shapes."

The teacher helped the last student tack up his page, then addressed the class.  "Okay, what we're going to do now is look at what we've done and see which pictures have actually found some sort of depth.  I'll go around to each of you and you can tell me which ones you like and why.  Remember, I don't want anybody to say 'it looks like something' or 'it reminds me of something'.  That's not what we're going for.”

The boy who criticized the teacher's criteria of dimensionality spoke first.  He pointed to a page toward the bottom which was completely filled in, but it didn't have the overlapping shapes.  All of the shapes were adjacent.  The boy liked this piece, but he said that it wasn't because it was three-dimensional (sticking to his opinion) but that the shapes fit well.  Peter agreed, thinking that the shapes and colors did all have a common feel about them, and that maybe the teacher was wrong to say that the types of shapes used didn't matter.  There was one particular green circle that, if anything popped out in his vision, was the first candidate.  Maybe there was a feeling about this shape and those around its perimeter.  Dwelling on this, he thought, no, there was no real feeling of quietness or peace about the picture, but he probably associated with it some such feeling, perhaps because he was relieved that there was someone who agreed with him about these works of art, if they could be so called.  That was the representation of it.  The other colors and shapes, mostly warmer, gave heed to this one, you might say they bowed down meekly to the green sun.  Is that too direct?  Maria spoke then, and she liked another picture, one in which the shapes wriggled around a bit more.  There seemed to be movement in it.  She said, "I like that one."  Why did she like it? the teacher asked.  "I don't know."

"Class, that's the last thing I want to hear you say.  If you like a picture, then there must be a reason why you like it.  Just to say," and he mimicked poor Maria here, "'Ooh, I think that one is pretty,' is a copout."  Then, instead of allowing Maria to redeem herself he moved on.  No.  He was about to point to the next child, but then it looked as if he had something important to say.  Maybe to wind things up.  The class must be over.  Maybe the bell didn't ring down there.  Peter was getting anxious now, hardly noticing where the art teacher now stood:  just to the side of his and Hemingway's color arrangements.  These two comprised the top row of pages, right at the teacher's eye level.  He leaned placing his hand on the wall.  He exhaled audibly.  Most of the class blinked, but Peter shifted down onto his lower spine and looked in the direction of his navel.  The teacher spoke.

"Now this is exactly what I was talking about." He chose to stop leaning and stand up straight.  "You don't want make the pastels look like crayons.  They're not crayons, people.  And you have to fill up the entire sheet of paper.  You want there to be a collage of shapes.  The purpose of the assignment was to show how adjacent colors can provide a sense of depth.  Is there a sense of depth in either of these?" he looked in close at the name on the one at the left, which was Peter's.  But he didn't say anything.  Peter looked over at Hemingway, who was biting his lip.  And he wasn't blinking either, like the rest of the class.  Well, I suppose he really isn't a bully.  His chin curled up a bit.  Then the boy looked over to Peter just as Peter decided to check his watch.  When is that bell going to ring?