November 23rd

FRAME IT, CALL IT ART

For a short time after I decided that I didn't want to grow up to be a biologist, I was an art major in college. I quit because I got tired of starving, and I really had no clear idea of how I was going to make a living with an art degree. My emphasis was ceramics, but we had to take classes in other stuff. Like painting. I am not a painter, but I figured I'd give it a try. During the first class the teacher (who had sympathy for poor students) told us that we could paint on paper-plain old butcher paper coated with gesso on both sides made a satisfactory painting surface.

The first class assignment: “Paint something.”

I went to the painting classroom one afternoon, armed with a roll of butcher paper, paintbrushes, a jar of gesso and five tubes of acrylic paint (white, black, red, yellow and blue). I grabbed one of those rolling bulletin board things, and tried to decide just what “something” I was going to paint. My first step was to take a piece of paper and rip the edges. Why? I decided that if I was going to paint on paper I would make it look like paper. I then did the same thing to another piece of paper. Since I had no clue what I was going to do it seemed prudent to have a back up piece of paper prepared for the very real possibility that my first (and perhaps second, third and fourth) attempt at painting “something” would end up in the trash. I stuck the two pieces of paper on the rolling bulletin board with thumbtacks, and proceeded to coat one side with gesso. I thought they were dry enough to turn over, so I flipped them and again stuck them to the bulletin board. I was wrong, they weren't dry, and they stuck to the bulletin board. Undaunted, I coated one with gesso. Then I wondered what it would look like if I put some blue paint in the gesso, so I did that and coated the other one. That looked good, so I went back and coated over the white gesso with the blue.

I now had two pieces of paper with ripped edges, stuck to the wall, with blue gesso dripping off of them. One with white peeking through the blue, one with brown. I sat down to try to think of “something” to paint on my prepared pieces of paper, and then I heard a voice behind me.

“Don't touch it! It's perfect.”

It was the professor. He proceeded to tell me how he liked my perspective of art being a part of its surroundings, blah, blah, blah. Okaaaaaay, no problem. Glad you like it. I spent the rest of the quarter ripping up paper and painting it different colors. I got an A.

So, I guess art is anything that the beholder believes is art. For instance, today at the store I saw a truck with a camper shell, that had hardened paint brushes sticking up all over it.

Interesting, but is it art?

It is now.