Un-Art

 

I'm not a visual artist.

Really.

I'm not being modest or anything.

I'm really not. Oh, I can paint with words, but that's it.

But in elementary school, everyone was an artist.

Because the teacher said so.

I should probably mention, here, that my painting of a tree looked . . . ahem . . . nothing like a tree.

Oh, it had a trunk.

Or more accurately, a TRUNK.

One large swath of brown paint.

Straight from the bottom of the page to the top.

Then there were leaves.

Okay. Well, I thought they were leaves.

My teacher was kind.

She merely smiled, tucked my painting away, and gave me something else to work on.

A lump of clay.

This was more like it!

She handed out more lumps of clay. “Now class,” she said, “I want you to make me a dinosaur!”

Oooh! That would be so much fun!

I tackled my lump of dark grey clay with enthusiasm.

Around me, dinosaurs of all shapes and sizes began to appear.

Triceratops.

Tyrannosaurus.

Looking more and more realistic.

I looked at my clay.

It closely resembled . . . a snake.

I worked some more.

Molding. Pressing.

Then looked around again.

Next to me stood a Brontosaurus.

Next to him? Stegosaurus.

I turned back to mine.

A snake.

But with legs.

I made the legs thicker.

Now I had a snake.

With thicker legs.

I kept at it.

My teacher walked by and nodded encouragingly.

I thickened the body.

Accidentally pressing down on the back end.

My sculpture sat up.

Yup. Sat up.

Huh.

Suddenly, it looked like a bear.

I smiled and made a large pot-shaped lump and put it between the four feet.

It really did look like a bear. Hugging a big honey pot.

My teacher stopped beside my desk.

“Diane, I thought I told you to make a dinosaur.”

“Ummm,” I said.

“That's definitely a bear.”

I looked down at my sculpture and nodded.

“A remarkably good bear.”

The teacher sounded as surprised as I was.

Again, I nodded.

“But you were supposed to make a dinosaur.”

“Do you want me to start over?”I asked, my hand hovering uncertainly over my work of art.

“No!” she said quickly. Then, a little more calmly, “No. You just keep working on that and we'll see.”

I shrugged and bent the legs a bit more around the honey pot.

Then I flattened them slightly at the bottom to form paws.

Then I stared at it.

A bear.

Where had that come from?

My teacher was just as astonished as I was.

She entered my sculpture in the local elementary level art fair.

My family and I moved before I found out how it did.

And definitely, before I got my sculpture back.

But I've often wondered . . .

Both where it came from.

And where it went.