The art room, I notice, is a lot like the physics room. Full of stuff. Down in the science wing it’s weights and machines and gears and stuff. Here it’s SLR cameras, collections of pens, sheets of cardboard and paper and paint and half finished sculptures and paintings on easels and in piles, pictures taped to the walls, dirty rags, projects abandoned on top shelves, who knows how long they’ve been here. 

I’m in the art room this morning, I was in the physics room earlier this week. I notice the amount of stuff in both because the art teacher and physics teacher are a couple. When they’re not working amid all the stuff, they are sorting out ropes and equipment for climbing, or tying kayaks to the roof of their van, or hauling skis and poles to the lift near their house. 

The stuff of work, the stuff of play. 

If we’re in the right job, the line between work and play is pretty fuzzy. It’s not even a line, just an area. Jen, the art teacher, is, for example, an artist. And although teaching these eleventh and twelfth graders comes with more than just doing art, she has surrounded herself with the right stuff, the things that make her feel good. A colleague introduced me to the term intellectual wellbeing this past year. I bet Jen finds a lot of that here, just like Mat finds the same for him in his physics room, and they both find on the water, the cliff face, and the ski field.

Jen walks the students through their final assessment for the semester. There is only a week of school left, so she’s setting them up for an exercise in comparing and contrasting similar, but different, paintings. Maybe they’ll find techniques like line and color and brush stroke (impasto, painterly, stippling … ). Maybe they’ll discuss forms, according to another list of vocabulary: rectilinear, curvilinear, organice, geometric. The rule of thirds, positive and negative space. Chiaroscuro, tenebrism, and other terms related to value.

The argot of an artist. Understanding art beyond “I like that,” which more or less describes my own naive level of analysis. Many of these words are new to me. 

I wonder if the art vocabulary came to be after the fact, arising out of the messiness of creativity. When we notice that there are patterns, the recurring techniques or themes that can be usefully grouped together to talk about them. We understand them, perhaps, and use them, in order to emulate them in future art, or maybe just to sound learned with the art we look at.

When I was a student in Germany, I had to pick a major, even though I really had no intention of completing a degree. I chose art history. I wonder now if I chose it because art was alphabetically at the top of the list, but that’s ridiculous, it would have been listed as Kunstgeschichte. There is a part of me that is quite interested in what is happening in this class, I can feel myself getting pulled into this discussion of how students are going to analyze the two paintings they are assigned. What is it about art that makes it so compelling? We see an ungodly number of images all day long, what is so special about one image, a static one at that, one scene, one artist’s use of the rule of third or pointillism.

Now she describes the assignment. Analyze the composition of the first artwork. Then analyze the composition of the second. Conclude with a list of similarities and differences of the two artworks, perhaps in table format. Follow it up with a reflection. What was significant or important about looking at these two artworks side by side?

Jen takes a few questions and dismisses students to go pick which artworks they are going to compare. They are laid out across several tables. Students don’t take long to choose. They find a comfortable place in the large studio, getting ready to analyze first one, then the other, then compare. Direct instruction is done. Just a few questions from a few of them as they get started. 

I get started, too. I get to be a student as well. I think what I’ve got in front of me might be stippling. I ask the boy next to me if I’m right. He isn’t sure, but Jen overheard my question and tells me … that I’m not right. More to learn, I guess. I should have actually gone to some of those classes thirty years ago at the Universität. I would have liked them.