Fragments of Faith

______My art teacher is a merciless trickster.

______It all began when he gave us our first drawing assignment, which was to simply draw a still life that was set up before us.  Alright, okay, no problem I've done this before a ton in Drawing I--throw some charcoal down, move it around a little, and in about two class periods, I've finished it.  Not bad, not bad.  For the third class period, he wanted us to add some color to it, to "embellish it," as he so eloquently put, so I traced out three circles and filled them with muted purple and yellow.  I hastily snapped a picture of it with my iPhone before leaving class that day.

______But wait.  Later in the day, el art teacher e-mailed everyone and instructed us to bring in an exacto knife, a ruler, and some rubber cement to our next meeting.  Interesting, I think.  I wonder if he'd be crazy enough to make us cut it up?  To cut it into squares or strips or triangles?  

______I would soon know the answer to my foreboding questions.  We come in the next class period, and he reveals to us that we're not yet done with the assignment.

______Now cut, he says. Cut your work into two-by-two inch squares.

______Our work, which we had spent some 9 hours on, was now to be reduced to cracker-sized squares that resembled abstract nothingness.  I might as well have been cutting into my own soul when I ever so precisely snipped and trimmed my art down to a lowly pile of mocking squares.

______My art teacher is a cruel one.

Rabbit Holes, 18x24, charcoal and colored pencil, Drawing II Fall 2012

______Unfortunately, he also must know some things, because I kinda liked the end result.  I worked the colored portions together to create a sense of objectification within the circles, even though there really isn't anything super recognizable there.  I suppose it's more interesting than the initial "boring still life" (no, seriously, that's what he named it on the syllabus) that we had to start off with, but I wish that there was some way I could have saved the initial drawing, too.  Art teacher said that my final drawing had a kind of depth to it, and some girl in my class compared it to Salvador Dali, who is pretty much my king, so both of those comments made me one super happy squid.  That being said, art teacher's assignments have been fun so far, and I'm kind of glad he's such a rad and surreal kind of dude.

______I suppose the fact that I wasn't too attached to the initial still-life drawing helped me reach such a conclusion about him, but hey--I can't just give him all the credit.