All I see are Angry Birds

Teacher: What do you see? Rising or falling?

Student 1: The composition is reminiscent of the Kantian Sublime…

Student 2: I see Angry Birds…

Sarita: It looks like 8 red rectangles. 

This painting by Kazimir Malevich is in fact titled Eight Red Rectangles (1915). Who would have guessed? Our 2-D design teacher spent an hour talking about how great this painting is—how bold and original because nobody had ever made this move to relieve art from the burden of the object. Then we were given this assignment: “Using only four squares in each picture plane, convey the feelings of solitude, isolation, and loneliness.” But before deciding on the three final designs, we had to do ten rough draft sketches for each of the three feelings.

All our assignments were like this. We were not allowed to draw “things.” We had to practice being completely nonobjective and still strive to accomplish the goal of the designer: to achieve unified, harmonious compositions using the elements of line, color, shape, texture, pattern, space, form, balance, hierarchy, scale, proportion, similarity and contrast. I got in trouble a lot because I only know how to draw things and not un-things.

And because our teacher wrote her MFA thesis on “the fine arts critique,” and spent two and a half hours being told her work was no better than a Hallmark card, she was able to impart a lot of artistic wisdom about how the inner artist in us all really needed us to stand in front of the class at the beginning of each session to explain the thought process behind each of our pieces. So we heard a lot of explanations like this:

“I always feel really vulnerable on my left side, like if I was going to get attacked or mugged, my assailant would come at my left, so I wanted to leave more negative space on the right side of my composition and add this massive organic shape with vertical and horizontal stabilizers to reflect this solid presence on the left side, but in the end I decided against it because I realized I what I really wanted was this chaotic crystallographic composition to convey that humanity is just a complete waste of space, okay? So, yeah…do you have a response to this?”

And then someone in the audience would say, “Well, it kind of looks like a slice of pizza or a goldfish eating marshmallows…”

The highlight from this class was that one night when we talked about patterns and how Islamic art has incredible patterns, which led to a discussion about ancient European churches and pilgrimages to see reliquaries and how one of the churches we looked at claims to have Jesus’ elbow stuffed in a vase somewhere. But that's what you get when you sit in a room with 15 other people who are losing brain cells because they're inhaling Sharpie fumes and the scent of rubber cement.

This assignment required us to "harvest" an organic design. We made viewfinders and were supposed to abstract an organic object to the extent that you weren't able to tell what the original source material was. Unfortunately, you can still see objective "plant-ness" in this picture. So I had to redo it. Although, during my critique session, someone said, "I would totally hang this in my bathroom."

Abstract organic design take II. You can kind of still see plant-ness, but whatever.

Using the same organic design from above, we had to then reinterpret the design using texture and pattern.

This is my achromatic scale. I made it on the 4th of July. It. Took. All. Day. And we still had to critique these--meaning, we all had to hang them up on the wall and comment on them. Nobody had anything to say about these. What a surprise. This is an insanely difficult assignment and we all failed. But nobody gets it right, said our teacher, which was her attempt to make us feel better about ourselves. 

Using the same organic design from earlier, we had to create a focal point using value (lights and darks). By the time we were done with this design, we all wanted to gouge our eyes out with spoons and never look at these designs again.

Our next assignment required us to harvest abstract designs using photos, paintings, printed materials. I found this photo and used the viewfinder to zoom in on the right side of the image, then drew a sketch with my eyes closed.

I repeated the viewfinding process with this photo using the upper 1/4 of the picture plane. 

The rough draft sketch looked something like this.

And then somehow I got this--I don't know how--using black gouache and water. Call me accidentally fabulous.

More squares.

Final project, based on the accidentally fabulous design from above. Ignore the crooked mounting job.

7 years in heaven is better than 6 years in heaven

Seven years ago when we were skinnier and had more hair and Jesse looked like he had just graduated from high school and I kind of just graduated from high school, we got married.

August 17, 2005, Salt Lake City

I used to think that was the best day of my life, but I don't remember much about that day, except that by some twisted turn of events, we were the last to leave our reception, instead of the first, and that there were generic Oreo cookies stuck to our windshield and the words "Multiply & Replenish!" streaked across the windows. 

Today was the best day. We woke up in Montreal, ran 8 miles, ate stale Poptarts, walked all over the city and watched an intrepid Asian tourist feed a squirrel out of his hand. Today was the best day because I've never loved my family more for making me the one Jesse wanted. And I've never loved Jesse's family more for making him mine.   

August 17, 2012, Montreal

It's magical

My color theory teacher's favorite saying was, “It’s magical!” She used it to describe optical illusions, color in general, and the universe. 

Megan made this. It's a classic example of crystallographic composition.

During the first week I just painted a lot of squares in color and black and white. Our first project was to take a color image and paint it in black and white to practice training our eyes to match hues to their intensity and saturation in the achromatic scale. I had to trace the image and transfer it to another piece of paper and then paint it by hand. I hated this project.

Random side note. We learned really useful color trivia, such as: Germans like their egg yolks darker, so they feed their chickens marigold petals and paprika, and that fleas in Louis XVI’s palace drove women crazy, but when one of Marie Antoinette’s favorite shades was named puce (French for “flea”) the name stuck and triggered a trend that inspired dyers to produce hues with names like “belly of flea,” “thigh of flea,” and “blushing flea.”

And then we talked about logo design and why designers use certain colors. We could pick any logo we wanted and reinterpret the original color usage to convey new meaning, and then somehow improve upon the original color. I chose the little Utz Girl who appears on bags of chips, pretzels, cheese puffs (a New England thing) because she started copying my haircut in 1921. 

The original. Dated. Clownish. Geisha.

achromatic-no color associations at all, loses some iconic charm of the original.

monochromatic-makes it look retro, more graphic.

complementary-complements enhance/intensify each other and call to mind sports teams. She looks like a Bronco's cheerleader.

polychromatic-this scheme makes things look childlike, and makes me look racist.

analogous-makes her look like Barbie's cousin.

split complement-yellow green, blue green, red orange. This makes her look like the Jolly Green Giant's adopted child.

attempt to improve original-updated color on cheeks to look youthful and less old fashioned and washed out than the original. Yellow stimulates hunger.

Part of the class work was to keep a color journal where we collected samples of real world color schemes in printed material, ads, photos, paintings, etc. We had to look for all the major color schemes/relationships: primary, triadic, secondary, tertiary, complementary, achromatic, monochromatic, polychromatic, split-complement, analogous, etc.

For one section of the color journal was to observe an object in nature and paint the colors we saw at different parts of the day. We had to paint the subject at dawn, at noon, at dusk, and at night. I hated this project.

We talked about color psychology--how writing with blue pen ink and painting your room blue stimulates creativity and how red and yellow stimulate appetites so they often appear in restaurants, etc. All of this plays a huge factor in determining the names of every paint color you can imagine. For example, the beginning of the recession marked designers’ renewed efforts to capture consumers’ attention by distinguishing their brands with names that tell stories, recall memories, or evoke emotions. So instead of calling beige "beige," companies go for names like toasted bagel because who wants a beige kitchen? A cooking space accented in toasted bagel is supposedly so much homier. Martha Stewart has paint with colors called Darkening Sky and Tempest instead of gray and dark gray. Benjamin Moore has Stormy Sky. Pantone has Turbulence and Tornado. The British company, Farrow & Ball, offers Dead Salmon (it looks like taupe). We read an article about a lady who works for Sherwin-Williams and it’s her job to name all their paint colors. Once she was assigned to finalize 1,000 new paint names (they rename paint every 10 years). It took six years. The naming process from start to finish only took 1 ½ to 2 years, but it took longer to do research and collect ideas from reading magazines, from traveling, and from day to day living to search for terms relevant to today’s environment. So of course, computer-speak made it into the final lists—she gave a range of grays names like Chat Room, Virtual Taupe, Network Gray, Online. Her personal favorite color is called Impetuous. It’s a 21^st-century chartreuse inspired by a color that was popular in the 50s. I want her job.

We talked about color usage and had to choose a subject in any medium and recreate the color in the scene so that it was used to convey different ideas each time. I found a photo of Jane Eyre and a scary English forest and manipulated them on PhotoShop.

arbitrary: colors appear to be random, objects are colored differently than they occur naturally

emotional: black recalls grief/mourning for all the deaths Jane witnessed as a young girl.

complementary: blue and orange might be my favorite complements

realistic: these are the original photos but I forgot to paint the tree brown and the grass green and creepy Mr. Rochester's face a flesh color

symbolic: Jane got locked in a red room as a punishment when she was little. The red room symbolizes anxiety, trauma, suffering, loss of innocence, her Aunt Reed "infantalizing Jane and forcing her back into the womb to be born again with a new attitude..."

My favorite assignment was our color function project. We discussed the four functions of color in nature: color is used in nature for warning, camouflage, mimicry, and attraction. We chose a subject to paint in four different settings with each one demonstrating the four different uses of color.  

warning

camouflage

mimicry

attraction

How to make summer disappear in two seconds

In May I met a teacher who confirmed my growing suspicions about the imbeciles who run the RI State Office of Education. When I couldn’t get a job teaching middle or high school kids how to write coherent paragraphs and revive the art of putting periods at the end of their sentences, I thought something was wrong with me, and I may or may not have been a little bit depressed for a while. On Tuesdays and Thursdays when I wasn’t at URI, I horbgorbled around our apartment in my pajamas without brushing my teeth or fixing my hair and I made multiple batches of cupcakes and ate them all myself. I stalked people on Facebook. I consumed entire boxes of Kleenex and drenched our throw pillows in soggy tears. I even read the news for a while. I couldn’t figure out what my problem was. I was applying to schools that posted ads like this: “Seven English teachers needed, no experience necessary, bachelor’s degree preferred. Convicted felons discouraged from submitting applications.” What was wrong with me?

And then in May after a training meeting at URI, I met a kindred soul. But her story was full of more intrigue than mine. She was the AP teacher at an expensive boys Catholic school, which happens to be across the street from our house, and to which I also applied. She fell madly in love with the English department chair and they decided to get married. He’d been divorced and when the headmaster (they still have those here) found out they were engaged they were uninvited to return the following year because he wanted to remarry after having a divorce, and divorce alone = unalterable impending doom in the Catholic worldview. Or something like that. So my newfound friend and her husband sought employment elsewhere. They each had about 10,000 years of experience and he had a principal’s license (even though he wasn’t an education major; he did alternative route to licensure). Every school he applied to said, “Sorry. You have to go back to college for four years and get your official teaching degree like everyone else. Then you can reapply. When my friend applied for jobs they told her they couldn’t hire her because she had a master’s degree and too much experience and they couldn’t afford her. That explained everything! I cannot get a job in RI because I have a master’s degree. And a level II teaching certificate. And a reading endorsement. And teaching experience. And because I tried to be proactive and hand deliver my applications to several schools that advertised openings so I could introduce myself to the principals. That sort of behavior is frowned upon here.

So maybe I gave up my job search prematurely. I sort of quit looking in May, but I had the feeling that no matter how hard I tried, I wouldn't have found anything. There might have been openings at high schools in Providence with the sort of reputations that inspire front page news articles about how students beat up teachers and the teachers get sued for hitting back in self defense. I wasn't interested in those jobs.

I needed something else to do with all the extra time I would have after giving up on finding full time work. So one day while I was sitting at home staring at the wall after eating a dozen red velvet cupcakes I made to celebrate my belated half birthday, I remembered that I live in the great state of Rhode Island, home of the Rhode Island School of Design, and that such a renowned institution probably has summer classes. I thought, “I could learn how to paint!” so I poked around on their website to see if they had a watercolor class in June or July. They didn’t. But they do have an extensive continuing education department with certificate programs in everything from jewelry design to personal property valuation. I saw children’s book illustration on the list and signed up for the program—mainly because they accept everyone whether you can draw or not.

I signed up for three classes, which, as I soon discovered, is too many for summer. And because someone asked me to run a half marathon with them in September and I said yes because I didn’t have anything else to do at the time, my whole summer looked like this:  

I would get up in the morning and if I was lucky, I’d see Jesse before he left for work. And then I’d see him for five minutes after I got back from class. And then I’d fall asleep. It was a fun summer.

The Relatives Came

May was Jason’s graduation month when relatives came from all over—Alaska, New Mexico, Florida, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania. When does this ever happen in the history of the Shuster family? The last time my dad and his brother and sisters, Aunt Kathy, Aunt Nancy, and Uncle Geoff, were in the same house was probably in July 2001, the month their mom, my Grandma Helen Jane, died. Since then, their kids have done just about everything: they joined the wrestling team and managed to escape ringworm; were voted prom queens senior year; went to the Pratt Institute; did university lab research on bacteria with really long names nobody can pronounce; learned to play the clarinet; moved to China; got married; built a photography business; and grew out of Furbies and into those really tight pants that make it easier to walk with a quarter poised between your butt cheeks, because that’s what models feel like on the runway. So many lifetimes passed before we met again.

But that’s okay, because it gave us lots to talk about. Like the ingenious pranks George used to play on the local policemen that should be written down in a book, and all the scientists Jason knows who believed faith and science are compatible, and why Dad felt compelled to stop at the grocery store, in the dark, on the way to Chipmunk Lodge to purchase a 2 lb brick of Cabot Premium Naturally Aged Cheddar Cheese and spray can whipped cream ("You can't get this stuff in Kotzebue!").

We spent graduation weekend tucked away at Chipmunk Lodge, having a family reunion. Not the kind where everyone wears matching t-shirts, but the kind where we woke to the smell of coffee brew and kitchen chatter about all the crazy relatives, punctuated by birdsong outside our windows. We fell asleep to midnight whisperings of people who stayed up late, after the flames died in the fire pit and we ate all the marshmallows, to watch stars that shine brighter in the North Country than anywhere else we’ve seen. Waking up and falling asleep to the rhythm of conversation reminded me that we’ve missed out on important things for so long.

The whole weekend made me remember all the ways I knew this family years ago. There were Thanksgivings in Albuquerque where we went bowling and walked into jewelry shops full of Nevada green turquoise carved by Navajo silversmiths and I could pick anything off the shelf if I wanted, but I chose the silver pendant with the jack-a-lope and wore it every day until it got lost in the move to Rhode Island and there will never be another like it, even if I go back to New Mexico to look for another one. There was the summer Aunt Kathy drove me to my interview at Dartmouth because Dad was recovering from surgery, and she said, “You deserve to go to a good school,” and we both wished I would get in so we could be only two hours away from each other instead of 4,000 miles. And I knew Aunt Nancy only from pictures, because we never took vacations to Florida, but I still have some of the things she sent in packages: the red rubber boots, a senior portrait of her daughter Esther, which still hangs in my bedroom at home, and Grandma Helen’s antique double-strand teal necklace. Meeting Sarah for the first time put a face to the name I’d heard from Dad’s stories—“You need to meet Sarah. She was a national soccer champion, a singer, and went to Rutgers”—and reminded me of the last time I saw her parents in 2003 when they drove from New Jersey to pick me up in Brooklyn and take me to The Waverly Inn in the West Village where the menu had braised rabbit and roasted Amish chickens and we sat in the back, near the massive tree that reached through the glass ceiling.

With as many of us as we could get in one place for a limited time only, we finally buried Grandma’s ashes at the Bethlehem Cemetery on Sunday, May 20^th. Before Grandma died, she wrote a letter, to be read at her funeral, in which she said, “Welcome to my CELEBRATION!” making it clear that she knew that death is merely the end of a fraction of the “fixed lifespan” that God has for each of us, that death is a homecoming to the more abundant life that awaits because of the Savior’s sacrifice. I didn’t need any tissue until Jason played Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah and then I was ruined by the time it was my turn to hold the blue box of ashes and say something, and by the time it came around to me, all I could think of was the year we lived at her house on Whitcomb Hill and she let us adopt a personable, and very skinny, cat from the animal shelter. Grandma let us have it, even though she was kind of allergic, and the cat liked Grandma best because she fed it a lot of cheese under the table, which is why the cat took on the appearance of a fuzzy brown basketball with legs and a tail.

The weekend was too short and we came back to more rain in Rhode Island. But I did two important things after we returned: 1) I used our wheat grinder for the first time in almost seven years; 2) I made lots of wheat bread and Dad took copious notes and promised to clean the kitchen in Kotzebue so he could find the bread hook, which nobody has seen in about ten years, so he can make his own bread.

Our house is quiet now and I’m trying to climb back into my other life while hoping that we’ll all see each other again before 2025.

 

Day 1: Graduation at UNH Campus

It's like the BYU Cougar...you just have to touch it, ride it, sit so it looks like it's patting you on the head...

That picture where there are two cameras and half of you are looking at one, while the other half is looking at the other...

Day 2: Picnic Day

You can't NOT go to NH and skip Chutter's

Don't leave home without it.

Later we hiked Mt. Agassiz

There is a lot of this in NH

And this...

Day 3: Last hike through the back of Chipmunk property. It's 90 degrees outside. Why am I wearing a sweater?!

Someone left a random trash can lying around...

The end.