EXCERPT FROM SARA’S JOURNALMarch 10, 1999
Calle Conde de Barajas, Seville
Good Art
E.B. is a disheveled, middle-aged painting professor who carries a
note-pad attached with a chain to his pocket. He wears black dress socks with cork-soled
sandals. He suggests an age-old colour exercise for his students, instructing them to
paint a cardboard box orange, then position an orange in the middle of it. Now his
students must paint the local colour of the fruit. (The orange is no longer orange
because it is in shadow). Many people fail. It doesn’t matter, E.B. says that
all of the good art was painted by Cezanne anyway, so what’s the point?
Each day, when E.B. saunters through the painting studio en route to
his tiny office, he passes the painters, and to each remarks, "I’ll have
something to say about that tomorrow". He closes the office door behind him and
paints straight from the tube.
Edgy L.Y. is working towards tenure and doesn’t want to screw
things up. Her next exhibition had better be successful or the board will not take her
application seriously. It’s a collection of life drawings—ten and twenty-minute
poses—dead ringers for the hundreds of drawings executed by her class. She flirts
with the students. She’s in a gap between fancy-free and motherhood, and then
there’s that old Victorian, where she lives alone, to keep up.
The saying among students in the Fine Arts Department is, "I
could draw when I came here." The first-year students’ skills of observation
are whittled away by the snorts and huffs of a handful of professors. The painters are
encouraged to make huge, formless, brown masterpieces, a precious two or three per
semester, and accompany the works with copious art-speak, emotional angst, revolutionary
talk and personal problems. The more accidental pregnancies, suicidal tendencies or near
dropouts the better. The professors nudge them in the direction of hopeless disgruntled
frustration, inspirationless.
A student lives a double life for years. From September to April she
trudges through ice and snow, groping blindly in the dark of her professor’s
expectations. For four months each summer she returns to her studio-shack at the edge of a
river estuary, and exorcises a hundred or so small, rather happy paintings, a rebellion
towards what is forbidden at school.
One day in studio a quiet painter, whose work is predictably somber,
throws a palette of primaries onto his canvas. The painting is illustrative and naïve.
Professor L.Y. is at home, sick in bed. The painter is ecstatic for several days, exulting
a technique-less but inspired composition. He recaptures some feelings he had before the
age of ten, before the death of his father . At the end of the week, the day before the
work is to be marked, L.Y. returns and horrified, instructs in a loud, cough-suppressant
voice, "Obliterate that thing immediately". "I hate it. I hate it, I
hate it."
The Art professors are dramatic. They say things like, "Nice
airbrush, Adam", when a student’s drawing becomes a little too smooth,
or, "Are you colourblind? How did you get accepted here? You’re sure to
fail". The students develop a camaraderie (perhaps the professors’ objective)
and spend a lot of time doing imitations, comparing insults, or genuinely trying not to
fail.
In the end, very little is accomplished in the way of skill, except for
an acquired laziness, sitting in the doldrums of Waiting For The Muse, giving up,
ceasing to wash themselves and inadvertently appropriating the style of this particular
school. There are however, creative sparks, good books, and mutual motivations. Students
admire each other, but for abilities each has brought inherently, not techniques gathered
while under the tutelage of a spirit-dead staff.
Paul is a mature student, a Dutchman who possesses the correct
pronunciation of Van Gogh. He stands before a landscape, large and pink. Professor
E.B is having a small exhibition at the University’s Art Gallery. "My God,
it’s like an Italian ice-cream parlour". The class is snickering. Graduation is
next week. E.B. turns at the door and exits, walking back towards his office. He’ll
grab his sandwich before looking at the portfolios of an anxious cluster of high school
students, all applicants for next year.
