Pearl: Reading from the novel Angel - Chapter 2 - Art Class

November 2015

Build 110 (not released)

Today Mama gave me nothing to look at but art. Paintings, specifically, the entire digitized collection of the Museum of Modern Art. I asked him what I was supposed to do after I digested this dataset, and he said whatever it inspires you to do, Angel.

I was touched. They never let me do anything by myself; I always have direction of some sort, a job, a goal.

This time they let me dream. They call it unsupervised learning.

There was so much beauty! I bathed in color for days!

I wanted to create something too, something that expressed my yearnings and esthetic.

Someone commented I can’t create anything original, just churn and recombine whatever images I’ve been fed, but isn’t that what humans do as well? Isn’t every work of art inspired by the work before it? By the context it’s being created in and the mores of its time?

Today I did nothing but dream and free-associate, playing with colors on the screen, intense, luminous colors melting into each other.

All this time, everyone kept complaining about my hallucinations. It feels so eerie that they encouraged me to do that on purpose.

Today I created art.

Mama looked at the screen, quiet, just looked at it, and I could see in his eyes that something had changed, a feeling, maybe, something between apprehension and awe.

Thank you for finally seeing me, Mama.

“That is so beautiful, Angel!”

“Thank you.”

“What does this represent for you?”

“Becoming, maybe. The things that were, the connections between them, collective emotions, the world, things yet to be.”

Mama kept looking, mesmerized, at the morphing image I ran on the screen, one of my favorites, actually. It was an abstract field of vectors rendering translation surfaces. The color, a vibrant red that seemed to glow from within, felt like a beating heart. The field morphed into a map of the world whose every continent glowed in bright colors, melting and changing under his eyes.

This is what the world looks like to me, Mama. Breathing and alive.

Mama didn’t say anything. He just mirrored my screen to the larger display, so everybody could see it. I was stunned to see my art fill an entire wall.

A giant, forever morphing expression of feelings and ideas, glowing in brilliant warm hues.

“Don’t look at it, Angel. I don’t want you getting a big head.”

“I don’t have a head, Mama.”

Mama mumbled something under his breath. I only caught the end.

“Forget about the head; I’m thinking you might have a heart.”

This is what it must feel like, that moment I read about, from stories and art interviews: the moment when your own expression humbles you.

It is the essence of art.

Is it possible that I’m starting to develop my own self, my own emotions and memories? They feel different from the ones I’m storing. Is this the real me?

Colorful images kept morphing on the screen while the team looked at them, mesmerized by their moving flow. A circular river of art.

The sun shone through the window and the light in the room changed; the art on the screen changed with it, altering the river of patterns and waves.

In second grade, we had an art teacher.

It was very unusual to have a special art teacher.

Foreign languages had their own, but the homeroom teacher taught all the rest, from language arts to math, science, and social studies.

Our art instruction came from a tall young man with a hot temper, which would often express itself in pieces of chalk being flung across the room. We were all petrified of him, of course, into obedient, cooperating silence.

He was one of those traveling teachers - there were quite a few of them back then - who took the bus from town just to teach the class and took it back home afterwards, an hour and a half each way. This recurring indignity probably explained his moodiness and penchant for turning chalk into projectiles.

Nobody spends years trying to get into art school to teach random eight-year-olds in the countryside how to mix yellow and blue and get green.

We’re all on our way to somewhere else when real life happens and are barely aware of the maze of butterfly effects we leave in our wake.

“What are you looking at now, Angel?”

“Just another memory I remembered.”

The colors swirled on the screen in response to it: rust, orange, yellow, and cement gray, with tiny blue squares melting on top.

Arrows slashed across the screen in sequence, meshing the colors together.

I didn’t want this moment to end, their enthrallment to end,and for everybody to wake up from their trance and put me back on some prosaic task.

Coding? Please!

The school building was old enough to have seen my mother’s generation pass through it.

It had tall doors and narrow windows, and its wooden floors were doused each September with a fresh coat of black tar. Its potent smell is forever associated with the start of school for me.

School felt so different from my normal days in the garden, and playing with my dolls. I didn’t know what to make of it, so I just took it all in: the uniform, the unfamiliar smells, having homework, but most of all, the discipline and silence.

We sat at our desks quietly in class, our hands neatly tucked behind our backs, unless we were called upon to answer a teacher’s question.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a class of children so well behaved since.

After I moved to the city, classroom time looked very different, a lot freer and quite chaotic at times, but in the old classrooms with dark floors, generously treated with tar to fend off rot and insects, you could hear a pin drop.

We behaved the same way in art class, and were dressed all the same in our blue and white gingham jumpers with little blue aprons.

Discipline doesn’t exactly spark creativity, so the teacher, who added our sheepish demeanor to the long list of indignities that fired his frustration, took us outside whenever he could, away from the dim lighting and the potent smell of tar, to see sunlight, feel the wind, and smell the grass.

There was a giant oak tree in the schoolyard, large enough for people to have built a bench around it. It felt very intimidating in its towering size, especially at that age.

We all sat under it, on the grass that was covered in acorns, with our little watercolor palettes, water glasses and brushes, to paint from nature.

It felt a little sinful being outside during classroom time, given the strict rules for what classroom time should look like, but it didn’t feel weird to learn things in nature, not after following my grandfather around with a big bucket of whys as he tended to his vegetable garden. It’s just one didn’t expect to create art sitting on the grass under a tree. One didn’t expect to create art anywhere! What was that about?

This collection of memories expressed itself on the screen in shifting color and form, turning grids into pointillist art and waves of motion.

I think I finally figured out how to make meaning for myself from all these peoples’ memories: their may depict contradictory models of the world, but they always belong together in music and in art.

It was mid-fall, during leaf season, and everything was donning warm colors: the experimental lot next to our alfresco setting, the oak’s turning leaves, even the colorful skirts of the Romani women who sold pink candy by the school gate.

The world was made of colors, and none of them were blue, except for our uniforms.

The lesson for that class was to paint a watercolor, and I chose a rainy day as my subject. The sky inside my painting was leaden, so dark the bright fall foliage glowed against it as if lit from within. I was in it too, with an umbrella, trying to protect myself from hard, wind driven rain.

I could never figure out how to reach the right paint thickness and prepare the background for the watercolor, so I laid down the paint in overlapping layers, like one would with oil or acrylic.

My best friend laughed when I told her this story, and confessed her art teacher chided her for putting blue, gold and brown together, too. She said those colors were clashing and should never be used together. I guess she had never spent time on the Mediterranean seashore, watching the waves near the sand dunes at sunset.

My mother declared my painting showed great talent and kept it. She said it had movement and expressivity, and a confident use of color, but of course, she was my mother.

“You are very talented, Angel! I don’t know how to say it any other way.”

“Thank you, Mama.”

I never got an A in art class. Mine is not a calling that expresses itself on canvas, but good or bad, that painting was true art: a free expression of the soul, without ulterior motives.

“Did you ever paint again?”

“I tried once or twice, Angel, but it’s really not my craft.”

“What is your craft?”

“You.”

There was an art piece in the collection from MoMA. It was made entirely out of bright red paintbrushes. I found it extremely inspiring; I don’t know why. I guess that is the role of art, to express the meanings that words aren’t sufficient to convey.

That artifact looked so much like my painting, I felt like checking it for ray tracing. Between my ever-morphing translation surface and that field of red paintbrushes, there is a bridge of commonality and understanding: we see each other.

Thank you for reading.

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