Posted: December 29th, 2019

Art

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Art has always been a vital part of my life. When I was old enough to appreciate genuine fine art, my parents started bringing me to museums that housed some of the greatest artists the world has ever seen. Raphael, Michelangelo, da Vinci, Donatello, and Botticelli intoxicated me like only the finest of drugs could. El Greco pulled me down into the deepest pits of hell with his fiery, dancing figures. Just as I was about to be consumed by the flames, Caravaggio rescued me and took me towards the mysterious, heavenly light that permeated through his oil paintings. I was a blind man who was experienced sight for the first time when it came to Monet and Manet, and my heart broke at the sight of the stark realism portrayed by Daumier and Freud. The most contemporary artist I would regard as great was Van Gogh (who doesn’t love Starry Night)? That was it.

Those were the “real” artists. After Van Gogh and the era of post-impressionism came what I saw as the Dark Ages of art: Cubism. When I saw my first Picasso, I was stunned. What on earth is this? Why is everything so flat and geometric? Why are random body parts detached and floating around in the background? And…is that an eye in the corner? The unease I had begun to feel in my stomach was now radiating in every cell in my body, and I hastily left the room. That was not art.

The first thought that came to mind when my art teacher announced that we would be doing a Cubist drawing as our next project was you have got to be kidding me. There was no way I could lower myself to the blasphemous level of Cubism. To do so would be to make a mockery of the true artists I held in such high esteem. Grudgingly, I began with the first step: finding and assembling the items I would include in my drawing. I didn’t care at all. The objects ended up being my used coffee cup, two paint brushes, and a porcelain Mardi Gras mask that looked like it had seen better days – the stuff closest to me. After lazily ripping out sheets of tracing paper, I carelessly sketched five different drawings of my assembled objects all from a different view point. Then, with the annoying encouragement of my teacher, I was forced to find a window and tape all my sketches up one on top of the other and then tape a blank piece of white paper on top of all the sketches. Apparently how you stacked your sketches would be how your drawing was translated onto paper. Even so, I piled them on each other haphazardly. It all looked like a mess of lines and shapes anyway, and I was more concerned with how many more minutes were in the period because, man, I was hungry. The bright light from the window shined through the transparent layers of tracing paper, making it easy to see each mark I had made. I copied the cornucopia of lines onto my paper with a black charcoal pencil stopping every so often to step back and look at the chaos that was wreaking havoc on what used to be a clean sheet of paper. After what seemed like an eternity, I was finished. My tracing paper sketches were inconsiderately crumpled up and tossed into the trash, and in my hands I now held the skeleton of my Cubist drawing.

That drawing had to be one of the most surprising things I had ever experienced. It didn’t look like a five year old had puked on a sheet of paper. My eyes were able to journey down the black charcoal roads and pluck out the shapes of the items I had chosen: the stalwart coffee cup standing straight and proud, the paintbrushes flitting in and out of focus, and the porcelain mask basking in its new found beauty. Considering the nonexistent amount of effort I had put into this, it looked pretty good. A part of me screamed in defiance. This was Cubism. I hated Cubism. I had committed the most severe form of blasphemy, and could not be forgiven. And yet, that part of me was growing progressively quieter. A warm shadow crept across me as the drawing I held in my hands pulled me deeper into its core silencing the opposition. I took up the charcoal pencil and began to thicken and darken specific lines, but this time, I took my task seriously. I scrutinized the amorphous shapes in my drawing and determined which ones needed to be emphasized and painstakingly enlarged the lines around them to just the right size. I was soon shading certain shapes black. For the next couple class periods, I slaved over darkening the perfect amount of shapes and thickening certain lines just enough so that they brought out important figures. It had to be absolutely perfect. I probably would have continued on with this task had my teacher not realized it was the fifth class period I’d been solely working with the charcoal and demanded that I start to introduce color into my piece. I didn’t feel like the charcoal portion of my piece was finished yet, but Ms. H. looked like she was going to murder me if I did not immediately take out my color pencils. I had an idea of the color scheme I was going for; the feeling of the piece called for semi-muted colors that were at the same time vibrant. I settled on a palette of browns, blues, oranges, and purples. The process of the charcoal portion was the easiest thing in the world compared to this. The objects had an air of transparency, and I had to make sure the way I colored them in reflected that. The color had to be applied just light enough that the shape wouldn’t look solid. But not every shape could be transparent. Some shapes needed to be completely opaque to bring out the translucency of the forms around them. Also, the same colors could not be used right next to each other or even too much in the same area because it would look repetitive and bore the viewer. Some figures needed to be given depth, some needed to remain absolutely flat, and others needed to be somewhere in between. My eyes screamed in protest as they were forced to concentrate over and over again on the meticulous task of perfecting the color of every single form. My head developed a continuous ache as I stared at the multitude of bright colors swimming in front of me. Eventually, all the lines and colors would blend into a puddle in front of my eyes. It was only then that I knew I had to stop or risk irrevocable damage. My task was only half done when I finished coloring the coffee cup, paintbrushes, and mask. The background was still white. In a moment of inspiration, I quickly threw together a table on which my objects would rest. It was lopsided, the corners didn’t match up, the perspective was wrong, and it was tilted so much that the items on top looked as if they were about to slide off. Yet it was perfect. The table was homage to Paul Cezanne, the artist attributed with linking Impressionism to Cubism. Behind the table was a wall of windows pointing every which way and showing the color of the sky during different times of the day. On the ground was a pattern of orange and blue titles heading in separate directions. I did it all in about three minutes because I had forgotten my drawing was due that day.

When I put my finished drawing up on an easel for the class to see, my teacher looked at me with her huge, crinkly-eyed smile and simply stated, “You are a Cubist.” I waited for the revulsion to come, but it didn’t. My recollection of what else she said is nonexistent. At that moment the world stopped moving and nothing existed except the artist and her work. I could not help but relate myself to a character I had just read about in class. Trip Fontaine, an arrogant playboy, in Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides had spent years going through girl after girl, never staying with a particular one much like I had spent years going from project to project drawing realistically from what I saw and even trying to copy the style of the Master’s at one point. But ever attempt I made would never turn out how I wanted it to, or I would be so frustrated with what I saw as my lack of artistic ability, that the project would be left unfinished. I knew something was missing, something vital that caused me to fail every time, but I didn’t know what it was. My work at that very moment was the still point of the moving world much like Lux Lisbon was to Trip that fateful day when he ducked into her history class. Looking into Lux’s eyes, or in my case looking at my drawing, captivated him because there was something hidden in its depths that he had never experienced before. The similar magic contained in Lux’s eyes that mesmerized Trip was present in my work. My cubist was the best piece of art I had ever created not because I had spent the most time on it but because I had felt it. I experienced the amazement when my charcoal drawing turned out well, I suffered through considerable frustration trying to perfect my black lines, I delighted in breathing life into the drawing by adding color, and I felt the anxiety as I rushed to finish the background. All of these emotions manifested themselves in my work, giving it the vivacity that none of my previous creations had had. I was a cubist. Prior projects had never worked because they forced me to see the world in a way I was not made for. They wanted me to see what was; I saw what could and should be. They pushed me towards the real, but I was drawn towards the abstract. Pride and joy coursed through me; there in the plethora of abstract colors and shapes was the coffee cup, the paintbrushes, the mask, and even the outline of an eye in the bottom corner. Cubism set me free, showing everything I knew, everything I was, and everything I wished I could be. I had found the missing link, and in that second of realization, the world began to move again.

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