up our daughter this year than when she was in Mrs. Tam’s kindergarten class-where, FYI, Georgia did manage to “fully meet expectations” in art). I take it you may think this gives you a somewhat “free-spirited” or “bohemian” air. But bohemian resides not merely in the costume, Miss Subramanium.
There was a time when I would gladly have sold my soul to curry favour with a particular curatorial demagogue, but I can tell you with certain authority that even back then I would never have stooped to impose strictures on others. A free-spirited woman does not make girls and boys form separate lines before they can enter the classroom, she does not restrict conversation during snack time, and she most certainly does not insist that when six-year-old children draw people or animals their feet MUST be touching the ground.
When my daughter informed me of this “rule,” despite the tears of frustration puckering her drawing of our late cat, O’Keeffe, I couldn’t suppress a snort. (Not an attractive habit, I admit, and one I’m attempting to rein in after a particularly ill-timed one at the head table of my husband’s annual Conservative Party fundraiser-I blamed the dill sprig on the poached salmon.) “I guess she’s never heard of Chagall,” I said to Georgia, trying to sound offhand, as I’m well aware that it’s considered verboten to undermine a teacher’s authority. Georgia, ever curious, wanted to know more, so I hauled out my dusty Gardner’s
Georgia was most taken with the goats-floating, soaring, violin-playing goats. “I wish I could fly,” she said, more pensively than her tender age warrants. Well, who doesn’t? (Do you suppose we could purchase posters of
I am an actuary by trade. My job involves evaluating risk. This has been ranked the number one low-stress occupation in the country, according to recent media reports, and I can attest to their veracity (which is why my dentist finds it so surprising that I grind my teeth in the night-bruxism, it’s called. That sounds like the name of an art movement, does it not? Something darkly male, something tantalizingly
As both a professional and a parent, it is my job to calculate risks, not take them. Taking risks-that is the artist’s, and the child’s, job.
Your feet-on-the-ground dictum, or “rool,” as Georgia put it in her journal, is just the starting point. There is also your oft-stated desire that the children make their crayon strokes in one direction and one direction only, putting cross-hatching on the same criminal level as giving a classmate a wedgie. And snipping the erasers off the ends of their pencils so that they’re forced to confront their “mistakes”-I won’t even go there right now. What I would like to focus on is your insistence that a drawing is not complete until the child has filled in the background.
Can I call your attention to the Toronto painter Ronald Bloore? Most famous for his white-on-white paintings of the 1970s and ’80s, which he has said represent “freedom for the viewer,” Bloore is a master of texture. The aesthetic pleasure of these works lies in the very white space you claim to abhor. The intra-textural space
To focus so intently on the absence of colour. To trust the viewer to distinguish between different kinds of whiteness-between
This is not to say that a child handing in a blank sheet of paper and calling it art should be met with cries of
I can almost hear you sighing, Miss Subramanium. It isn’t my tendency to psychoanalyze, but it’s not difficult to imagine what this fear of white space implies. You don’t like to be alone, do you? Whiling away empty hours fills you with an unnameable terror, does it not? There are people who can help with this-God knows I have a list of contacts as long as my arm. Just say the word.
The point of art, Miss Subramanium, is in
And in a life full of almost continual, albeit inconsequential, disappointments, with others, with ourselves, in a life full of notable
In all fairness I should tell you that your self-referential habit when addressing the children has become a source of amusement at our house. Miss S. is getting frustrated over the level of the noise in the classroom. Miss S. needs someone to run to the office and get her some Tylenol 3s. Miss S. needs a minute to finish her text message to her ex-boyfriend. “Miss S. sounds likes Dobbie in
Perhaps you come from a troubled home or even a troubled country, if your last name is any indication. It is not in my nature to pry. But your quest for order appears to me a manifestation of an obsessive need to wield complete control over your small fiefdom. The word
Can I call you Shayana, Miss Subramanium? Miss Subramanium is, after all, a mouthful, and so formal considering I am technically old enough to be your mother. As for Miss S.-well, I’m hardly one of your little charges.
There was a time, Shayana, when I wore my era’s equivalent to your dreamcatchers and rebellious T-shirts. I had aspirations. I was giddy with my own sexual power-a simulacrum of power fed by the illusions of youth and a type of wan beauty, but power of a kind nonetheless. Every day brought a new opportunity for adventure. Did I imagine then that I would spend the bulk of my days, year upon year, in a small office cubicle with an Excel spreadsheet on the monitor in front of me, a photograph of a laughing girl on a portable potty as my screen saver, and on my desk a miniature inflatable punching bag (a Secret Santa gift from my colleagues) of the existential figure from Munch’s
I had an advantage over my fellow students at the art college-I could see voices as colours and shapes, and without the aid of any psychotropic. As long as someone was talking, I had a palette to work with. The nasal Upper Canada monotone of my life-class instructor produced oddly compelling anorexic oatmeal-streaked buttocks and breasts (you may imagine how this annoyed the model, who was rather voluptuous and rosy hued, but the sketches earned me instant recognition as an iconoclast). My roommate’s throaty smoker’s laugh gave me a series of large canvas magma flares in reds, oranges, and basalt. The melancholy-flecked sound of my Estonian landlady talking to