April 20, 2006

• Feeling Small

  
  

  
  

   

  
  

  Sam: Every time I go to the MoMa I spend more time checking out what people are wearing than the actual artwork on display.  People are just so artsy here.  I can’t think of any other way to describe it.  Eccentric?  Capricious? Whimsical?  My SAT vocabulary cards probably have a better idea.  Whatever they are, I want to be just like them.  One of those artsy city slickers, sipping black coffee at some tiny hidden café, wearing odd hats found in trendy boutiques, listening to vinyl records in my messy apartment.  That’s basically what I dream about every time I come here. My awesome future. 

  
  

   

  
  

  The actual reason I come here, though, is entirely for the sake of taking notes in my sketchbook, a doodle here, a sketch there.  I have to carry that damn thing around with me everywhere now, since the AP Art final exam portfolio thing has to be completely done by the end of this year.  Thirty-six college-worthy pieces need to be all packed up and ready to go by mid-May.  Thirty-six.  I don’t think my entire life’s compilation of works even adds up to thirty-six.  My age doubled doesn’t even add up to thirty-six. And yet as ridiculous as the number is, I’m a slave to it.  My room is trashed with magazine cutouts, oil paints, crusty brushes, crumpled up pieces of paper.  Twenty-six down, ten to go, I tell myself.  Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine.  The things I do to get into college.

  
  

   

  
  

  My little sister Rory flicks my shoulder when I daze off like I just did.  I forgot to mention her.  Mom makes me bring her along on my MoMa expeditions because it’s easier than hunting around for some brace-faced babysitter.  You’d think I’d mind this, considering this is my future I’m dealing with, but she’s decent company.  She flicks me on the shoulder sometimes, like she did just now, but it’s only when she wants to move on to the next painting in an exhibit and I’m blindly staring off at the passing people. 

  
  

   

  
  

  “Sam,” she says, and her eyebrows rise into the middle of her forehead, her mouth gaping, “Look over here.  I think I’ve seen this one before.”

  
  

   

  
  

  She grabs the sleeve of my jacket and pulls me to the piece, one that is shrouded with several chin-stroking observers.  We fish through the crowd, peer over some heads, and I recognize the piece about as quickly as I’d recognize Madonna. 

  
  

   

  
  

  

  
  

   

  
  

  “I know I’ve seen this before,” she says, biting her bottom lip, eyebrows furrowing.  I stare at her like she is the biggest moron on the planet.

  
  

   

  
  

  “Van Gogh’s Starry Night, Rory.  Do you live in a cave?”

  
  

   

  
  

  She shrugs.  “If I do then you do.”

  
  

   

  
  

  That's the one thing that annoys me.  When my nine-year old troll sister outwits me.  I just want to be like, “No, no, Rory, now you’re supposed to whine and complain and be embarrassingly immature because I’m just flat out more intelligent than you,” but I know perfectly well that it’s simply not part of her nature to act like that.  She’s peculiar, I think.  Peculiar is the perfect word for her, as Starry Night soaks in and reflects out of her deep brown eyes.  Only if she were me, she would know that Starry Night isn’t even that great of a painting.  I never understood what made it so freaking special, so unmistakably famous, an icon of the art world.  I mean, look at it, I think, it’s just a bunch of lines.  I bet I could do an exact replica of Starry Night about as easily as I could make my bed, paint my toenails, finish my homework.  Even Rory could pull off a Starry Night if she wanted to, and I tell her so.  But she only continues to gape at it in undisputed wonderment, like she does with the millions of other things that positively fascinate her. 

  
  

             

  
  

  Rory’s young.  When you’re young and naïve like that, you simply can’t understand art. Art is a skill. An acquired skill.   

  
  

   

  
  

  I flip open my worn-out sketchbook and slowly thumb through my own drawings, slightly tilting them towards the unblinking eyes of my hypnotized sister.  As if saying, hey, look, look at what I did. These, Rory, are hardcore pieces of art. My drawings of real people, realistic drawings of existing things.  It takes skill to draw reality, years of art classes and sketchbooks and practice. She looks at Starry Night and probably sees a recent episode of Spongebob Squarepants, The Rugrats.  A scene from Finding Nemo. I look at Starry Night and I see lots and lots of lines, movement.  That’s what Van Gogh was trying to convey, anyway.  Movement.  And he did a great job and all, but seriously.  Starry Night?  Come on, anyone could do it. 

  
  

   

  
  

  Rory:  I know Sam doesn’t want me to be with her right now, but I really like this place.  I felt like a grownup when we took the train into the big city and I could stand a foot away from a skyscraper, try to look up at its top, and feel like a tiny ant because the skyscraper appears to never end.  And as much as I love the city, Sam loves it even more.  I can see it when she’s busy seeing everyone else.  She is interested in people even more than the paintings in the museum.  She looks at them with wide eyes and an open mouth, and I have to wake her up every few minutes to show her a pretty picture I found.

  
  

   

  
  

  I flick her extra hard when I come across a bluish painting with all these people around it.  I saw it and it instantly set off a spark, like a familiar song or smell, and I knew right away that I had seen it somewhere before in my life.  When we get a better view of it, she gives me that older sister look she gives and tells me the painting is called Starry Night by Van Gogh.  Then she keeps acting like she’s older and better and smarter, and I don’t even care because Starry Night is so beautiful and so close that I almost feel like I am a part of it.  Sam doesn’t feel the same way, though, because she is looking at her own drawings.

  
  

   

  
  

  When I look at this painting, it isn’t just a painting.  It’s a surrounding feeling as well.  The sky is gigantic.  It has gusts and paths of stars swirling and twinkling, a shimmering wind in the night.  The sky is gigantic, enormous, so much bigger and more powerful than that tiny, dark little city crouching below it.  This painting, although it is so much smaller than me, it makes me feel smaller than the smallest ant.  Here I am in this huge city, this busy place with so many people and places, feeling small. Here I am in this huge city with never-ending buildings, those towers, those skyscrapers.  And they don’t even touch the shimmering and swirling blanket of starry night.

  
  

   

  
  

  I really do want Sam to see what I see, but she is still too in love with the big city, looking at her own drawings as she stands in front of the Starry Night.  Sam is an artist and she tries to act like one, but all of her drawings are of models from magazines and photographs.  She tries to teach me what art is by showing me what she does.  Most of her art is of what she sees in real life.  She says this is art because it is hard to copy real life onto paper, but I always thought we had cameras for that.

  
  

   

  
  

  As I watch Sam watching her art, I hope that one day she will paint something like Starry Night.  I don’t mean she should copy Starry Night, either, because anyone with a paint-by-numbers kit can do that.  I hope one day she will be painting a picture of one of her beautiful models, and she will realize that painting reality, copying the real world – those paintings can’t go any farther than the reality that they live in.  I hope that one day she will feel small like me and she will toss reality out of her apartment window. And I hope that on that same day she, with a little help from the endless swirling sky, learns how to paint with what she feels.

  • 12:32 am
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