Art and art not

Paint brush

A recent spate of emails in our newly formed high school batch mate group launched me off on a nostalgic trip, as usual.  The victim this time being our art teacher, Mrs. S.

We had art classes from Std. IV to VIII, and there was ONE art teacher, Mrs. S.  Twenty years later, I can understand what made her the way she was, a spate of domestic problems that included being set on fire in the past by a vindictive mother-in-law and escaping by the skin of her teeth, a chronically ill husband, perpetual financial troubles of running a household in a teacher's salary and a big group of artistically challenged kids.  But at the age of 10, what strikes you is the terror that would envelop the class on Wednesdays in anticipation of the two periods of art class and Mrs. S after lunch. 

In retrospect, her art projects were very interesting, but the misery of art class and Mrs. S. shadowed any benefit we could derive from them.  There was one where we would use sandpaper to create a desert scene on paper.  We would cut camels (mostly looking like a cross between a sheep and an alien) out of art paper, use soft sand paper for sand dunes and water color the sky a blue (or  if we were imaginative enough, flaming orange to signify the heat).  At the end of the class, there would be sand in our socks (how did they get there?) and all over the classroom floor. 

Another project was contours.  My eternal nightmare.  We would buy a map of India or USA (Why USA?  I don't have a clue) from R. B. Store.  Then under the huge banyan tree (which has sadly been cut down now) in front of the toilet, we would make a big tub of paper mache with newspapers brought from home, and use the goo to show the various landscapes over the country.  For example, we would make huge mountains at around the Himalayas in the map, smaller plateaus in the Deccan and flat plains in the Gangetic and coromandel sections.  And once they dried over the week, we would paint them with watercolors. Brown for the hills, yellow for plateaus and green for plains.  The one Mrs. S does would look like a miniature country.  What we make (or more specifically I make) would look like a sample from the toilet behind.

Perspectives.  That was another of those nervous breakdown-inducing projects, where we would have to draw various objects as seen from different angles.  Not just draw.  We had to make calculations.  For example, if you were drawing a television, to get the straight up view, you would draw an equilateral triangle and draw a line three quarters of the distance from the corners of the parallel side and so on, if you get the drift. I was more interested in drawing knobs on the television. Yes, you imbecile, immature young things, televisions had knobs, not buttons. And were in black and white. And had lovely teak wood cabinets.  But I digress.

Ah, how can I forget the art book cover?  We had to make our own cover for the art book - the standard brown paper or the more common newspaper cover would not do.  The process involved having your father fill up the biggest bucket at home with water (at a time when Madras was reeling under a water scarcity), add a few drops of India ink exactly at the middle and let it diffuse by natural convection so that it forms random patterns on the surface of water, and your dad gingerly dips a chart paper on one side and lift it abruptly, all the while cursing himself for putting you in this school, so that the random pattern stuck to the paper, and you carefully place it in the sun so that it dries.  If you think that sounds easy, try doing it without letting the pattern run, or the paper becoming mache.

Okra flower

Carrot heart

Vegetable block printing.  Moms would give us ladies fingers (okra) and carrots for class grumbling about the cost of vegetables these days.  We would carve out nondescript shapes out of the carrots using half a blade (yes, kids, dad shaved using razors that used blades that were tightened on the razor with nuts and bolts and used blades were given to us for art work) with a lot of blood shed and carefully deseed cut okras so that the crossection looked like a flower.  We would paint them with water color and print on our notebooks which would soon smell of decomposed vegetables. This art form, I must add has been dutifully passed on to my daughter who makes me buy okra every day so she can block paint her diary (see proof).

There was one more where we would bend some metal string after poking ourselves in various internal organs into, what is supposed to be, a human form, fill it up with cotton, wrap kite paper and make stick dolls. If someone knows what I am talking about, I would be obliged if you could describe it in more detail so I can teach V to do it for the rest of her summer vacation.

Mrs. S had an impressive repertoire of art ideas.  With my new found interest in art, I regret not having paid more attention to her.