Art the lazy way

My recent painting project brought to mind pleasant memories from my college art class, which I begged to get out of due to zero talent -- I was never in demand on Pictionary teams -- but to no avail. This was a course for teachers, and no matter that I was specializing in preschool special education, I needed to study the great masters of art! I have always believed a course in refrigerator art would have been more relevant, but no one asked my opinion, and no one offered such a course.

After we had studied several different art styles and the artists who exemplified them, we were given an assignment to produce some original works in these different styles. We did what college students do when faced with a challenging, thought-provoking assignment such as this: We looked for the easy way out.

We found that easy way out in the artist Jackson Pollack. If you know as much about art as I did back then (and still do), you might not be familiar with Mr. Pollack. His paintings consisted of brightly colored paint plopped and flicked onto enormously large canvases in random fashion. (The refrigerators of preschool parents are filled with mini-Jackson Pollack type paintings. Little do they realize that with just a bit of encouragement, their darling children could become starving artists!)

Compared with the great masters of other styles we had studied, such as Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Seurat, Mr. Clean, etc., we all thought Jackson Pollack was a bit lazy. This was something we admired enormously and were eager to emulate, at least artwise, and especially for this assignment. How hard could it be to flick paint on paper? This could even be fun!

Our hopes for an easy grade, however, were dashed almost immediately when the instructor informed us that under no circumstances would a Pollack style be accepted. The whole aspect that set Pollack apart -- other than his apparent laziness -- was the enormous scale on which he worked. It would be impossible, the instructor explained, for us to imitate it. Flicking paint onto a 14" x 17" canvas -- or even a 24" x 48" -- just wasn't the same.

Privately, we thought this wasn't such an obstacle, a there were plenty of buildings on campus that could use some sprucing up. They were big, just what we needed. No sooner had we thought it, though, than the instructor warned, "And no graffiti!" in his most solemn tones. No doubt some class before us had already thought of this solution, tried it, and failed, making things harder for the rest of us.

We briefly considered painting our living rooms in the Jackson Pollack style, but we couldn't get past the problem of how to bring the finished product to class. Anyway, I wouldn't recommend painting your living room in this style. For one thing, all the furniture would end up Pollack-looking, too, no mater how well you covered it.

I have long forgotten what I ended up doing for that assignment. But the class left me with one overarching impression about art: The Pollack family must have had one enormous refrigerator.