Read it or be Square

As I sat in the Lenape art room listening to constant chatter and a teacher trying to teach us how to be artists I stared out the gigantic window, which happened to be the only source of light, because I was bored out of my mind. Sadly, I have never understood art, the only things a really remember about art from those days were mixing the pretty colors of the rainbow into a disgusting gray-brown conglomeration of stuff, and my friend Lorenzo somehow going from brown hair to pink hair in a matter of seconds. I also remember we had a project where we had to pick a certain style of painting and then try to recreate that style on a blank canvas. My group chose cubism because we assumed it was going to be easy, “all we have to do is paint squares right?” In order to imitate these painting styles we had to look at examples of those types of paintings. We mainly focused on Pablo Picasso because he was famous for cubism. While it seemed like we looked at thousands of examples, the one I remember the most is his painting called the “Three Musicians.” I remember it only because I didn’t get it, “Those aren’t people,” I said, “They look like something I could make in five seconds.” My naïve mind thought that art was supposed to be a realistic representation of the world, not a conglomeration of random shapes that seemed almost as random as the colored paints I mixed together to make ugly colors. How was my young mind supposed to comprehend that art can be anything and that “good” was just an opinion? The words that I had heard so often, “good,” “great,” “amazing”, and others used to compliment me and my school work could possibly not mean anything at all, maybe they were just someone’s opinion. I think this painting was when I started to realize that abstract thoughts were annoying, why did Picasso have to paint with a weird combination of shapes to depict three musicians? Why not just draw them how they actually looked like? Even today I remain confused how people can understand abstract paintings and stuff and while I can handle trying to understand them, I prefer my world of math and science