erotica and pornography

How is erotica different from pornography? (Explain your vote)

• Erotica has literary or artistic merits; pornography doesn't
• Erotica is pornography done with style
• The difference is nebulous and hard to articulate, but it's there
• There is no difference
• You can find erotica in the Bible, but not porn

Vote in the poll



Pornography appeals almost exclusively to sexual impulses -- as you say, it's designed specifically for masturbation -- yet I'd contend that titillation, awakening sexual desires and feelings, is a definite intent where erotica is concerned as well.

And erotica can be pretty damn explicit too. "Song of Songs" contains references to oral sex as well as the more garden variety forms of intercourse, and was explicit enough that one of the Medieval Popes was reported to masturbate to it.

How essential is the intent of the work's creator, anyway? "Song of Songs" presumably isn't meant to be pornographic, but its steaminess is evident enough that I remember one NKJV study Bible I had that insisted the book was purely an allegory and not meant to be read by spiritually immature believers. Conversely, it's not impossible to imagine a photographer who looks at Penthouse or Hustler from the perspective of lighting and framing, i.e., evaluating it as trash on its lack of artistic merit rather than on its actual content.

I'm no artist, but my take: The purpose of art is to inspire a reaction of some sort. If you shrug your shoulders in an offhand way and say "Eh, that's nice," the artist may have made a pretty (or ugly) picture, but she has failed as an artist.

Art may inspire you all the way to a transcendental experience, to deep introspection, to anger or to grief ... and yes, even to sexual desire. What you do in response to that inspiration is in large part your responsibility. If your anger leads you to fight injustice, that's good; if it leads you to assassinate the archduke of Sarajevo, that's bad -- but I don't think it's entirely right to blame it on the art as some are wont to do.

(Not that this lets the artist entirely off the hook. There's one piece I can't remember the name of that essentially guides its viewers into an act of voyeurism, by looking through a peephole at an image of a naked person. Though even there you could argue that the artist's goal was not to lead you into voyeurism and peeping tom behavior as much as to comment on how much we already are voyeurs and peeping toms.)

So what is the distinction between erotica and a nude? Again, I'm no artist, but I would say that the difference lies in intent.

With erotica, there is some sexual overtone or intent to the work, even if it's understated and portrayed through something as traditionally nonerotic as eating a bowl of corn flakes. A nude is simply a depiction of the human form, sans clothing. An engineer surely can appreciate the elegance of design that goes into the human form.

That's what the nude in art is, though I daresay anyone can eroticize it even when it's not eroticized by intent, much as we could write an erotic scene about painting a wall, eating corn flakes, or even washing the dishes.

(Ironically, the ones who are most likely to eroticize the nude in art are the ones who are most determined to stamp out pornography, as demonstrated by former Attorney General John Ashcroft, who made putting a drape over Lady Justice's bare breast one of his first official acts.)

I'm taking art class and learning how to draw

This afternoon, I will have finished my first eight-week session at the art academy where Evangeline has been taking lessons the past few years. Rachel and I started drawing in January, and now we're done with the first round, save for critique week.

It's been an interesting experience. I've never felt I was much of a visual artist, and this experience has done a lot to remind me why I feel the way I do. I've had to relearn how to hold and how to sharpen a pencil, how to shade something, and, when you get down to it, how to make any drawing more advanced than a doodle of Scott Adams quality. I've also done this learning in the presence of children who receive continual positive reinforcement to keep them engaged, while I've been getting constructive criticism to help me learn. (And let me add that Rachel's been quick to tell me how much better than me she's been doing.)

On the other hand, I have to admit that I'm getting better I finished a picture of a panda last week that's better than anything I've ever drawn, and even Evangeline gave me a thumbs-up Sunday evening on a picture I was working on.

I'm certainly trying to be productive. Although my only completed projects in class have been a drawing of the basic shapes and the aforementioned panda, at home I've attempted to draw my sneaker, two eggs, a coffee mug, and a birdseye view of the basic shapes.

That last was my idea, just to give myself a way to practice visualizing and using what we'd been taught. I don't have a digital copy to share, or I would do so, but I was mostly proud of how it turned out. My chief disappointment was that I placed the light source in the picture, and it simply looks like a flat circle in a world of cubes, cones and cylinders.

The sneaker was my first actual homework assignment. Ana was intending me to struggle with grayscaling and I did, even though I didn't know that's what I was struggling with. I thought I was struggling with drawing a dirty white sneaker with blue parts, using only a 2B pencil. How do you draw white with a pencil? How do you draw blue and not make it look like black?

I'm sure my artist readers are laughing in recognition of the struggle, which they dealt with years ago. Still, while that aspect of the drawing was a mess, I did do a decent job (I thought) with the lines of the sneaker itself. I drew it at an angle, included the laces and the eyeholes, and generally got its features in right, although I confess I deliberately left out a few eyeholes because it was taking too long and Rachel already had finished hers.

The second assignment was an egg. I tried this one twice before I was satisfied, though Rachel of course whiz-banged hers out in about five minutes, complete with a bird popping out of the shell. The steady curvature of the egg made it difficult to get the lighting and the shading right, a problem that I finally realized was exacerbated by two light sources. After I killed the kitchen light, I could see the proper shading much more easily, and acted accordingly. I did still miss the darkest portion of the egg under the curve.

This was the last time "white" posed an impassable barrier to me, though. I realized after I used a sticky eraser to remove extra graphite from the drawing that my mind was processing the shaded areas as a form of white even though I knew that they really weren't. (But then, what is white anyway? When a shadow falls across white paint, we still see it as white even though it obviously has something dark falling across it.)

By this time I was deep in Pandaland, but Ana gave me the assignment of drawing a coffee mug. I undertook it with relish, and I think I did a good job, even though it's the blackest damn white coffee mug I've ever seen. Because of the angle the light came from -- overhead, to the left, and just behind me -- the mug and its handle had the dangest shadows that I had to duplicate on the paper.

I wish I had digital images to share right now, because it would make the entire discussion that much clearer. Maybe later on I can add some.

The chief problem I encountered here was with the character lines on the mug, the lines that mark the where the cup ends and the grounding begins, so that a two-dimensional drawing can have the illusion of being three-dimensional and standing up from a background.

My practice, which I have not yet completely broken from after about 33 years of not knowing better, is to give the character lines a uniform thickness, all around the edge of the picture, as though I'm drawing a coloring book. The lines are supposed to intrude into the shape at times, to show where the handle of the coffee mug attaches to the mug itself, for example -- and they're supposed to vary in thickness, sometimes even fading out entirely, to reflect how the light strikes the model.

I'm not there yet, as I was reminded with my drawing of the panda. It's brain-breaking work if you're not a visual artist by nature or custom, but I'm working on it.

I drew the panda using a technique called squaring the model. This is when you take a picture, overlay a grid onto it, and then lightly make a grid on your art paper before duplicating the picture on the new grid. I've heard the technique used to make larger- or smaller-scale versions of the picture, usually by drawing in the new grid whatever is in the original gride, block by block.

Not here. What Ana had me do was to mark with dots on my grid the points where the drawing would cross the grid lines, effectively creating a constellation that would serve as the basis for my image. And then I had to look at the model upside-down and draw not the panda, but the grounding. Ana called it rewiring my brain; I call it frying my synapses. Either way, it's supposed to help me recover the art brain that schooling drives out of us by forcing us to look at fixed shapes.

This is one technique, admittedly, and if I stay the course with the art lessons, there are others I will learn more of, such as how to use basic shapes to draw things free-hand. But knowing it was good enough for my nefarious purposes.

You see, my mother's birthday is coming up in a few months, as is Mother's Day. I'm already contributing to a present with my other brothers for the one, but not the other, and I have a hard time seeing the point to buying my parents things when they have everything they could want or need.

They do love the grandkids, though. And they love their sons.

So, I'm working on drawing an original piece of art or two, showcasing the girls, for my mother to hang up in the house somewhere. (Whether she will or not, I don't know, but given that I spent three hours making this so far, I sure hope she does.) I took a Chuck E. Cheese picture I have of Evangeline, and have been drawing a copy of it for her.

Again, I wish I had a digital copy to share now; perhaps later. It's not finished yet, but I like the way it looks, and even Evangeline -- usually my harshest critic on these matters -- likes it.

Those art lessons may pay off yet.

driving back the rats

One of the perils of staying at home with the kids is that after a while rats begin to eat your brain.

I feel the progress of the rats in dozens of different ways: the difficulty I have in getting back into "the zone" and finding the mania that lets me write well, the steady consumption of my mind with minutiae and daily grindings, and the way I've had to remind myself that I really am an intelligent and articulate fellow with viewpoints that other people need to hear.

Reclaiming my cerebral cortex from the infestation of rodents takes deliberate effort. I need to set aside time to write, even if it's just a pissante little entry on my blog that only a few friends and relatives will read. I need to watch something a little deeper than the Bugs Bunny cartoons I've taught my daughters to love. And while it's OK to read a Brian Michael Bendis treatment of Daredevil, it doesn't exactly hurt to read an old German revenge epic like "The Nibelungenleid" every now and then either.

The rats are winning, and I need to drive them back.

Today I took my first art lesson at the art studio where Evangeline has been taking classes for the last three years. It was nothing particularly advanced; it was, in fact, foundational, dealing with the four basic shapes and simple shading techniques, as well as an introduction to basic artist vocabularly like "restating the line."

The first week went well. I'm learning to hold (and sharpen) a pencil all over again -- the way I've been doing it for the past 32 years is all wrong, and always has been, but no elementary school teacher ever was able to get me to change -- but I came in already knowing a little about perspective, about the importance of making a line with a single bold stroke, and having picked up a few tidbits from having an artistically gifted daughter.

Best of all, I'm taking the class with my other daughter, Rachel, and we're learning together.

I'm having a great time, and the rats are drawing back, even if just a little bit.



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Psst! I totally stole this from Brucker.

comic art appreciation

Here is where we see how a lifetime of reading comic books can pay off in appreciating art.

A friend of mine named Walks in the Rain has a compelling four-page prologue to a comic she has been working on for a while. At the moment, the prologue lacks any words, an absence that makes the work even more compelling and intense. My reaction comes more as a writer than as an artist (which is to be expected, all things conisdered), but I love the pacing of this sequence. The first page is dominated by a half-page panel of the woman lying on bed, her eyes drawn to something unseen, her spirit clearly restless.

Next we see her rise from the bed, but she is drawn not to her desk or other work, but to the window, where she stares out into the night. It's possible just in these three panels to hear the spirit of the night calling to her to leave the confines of her room, her house, and to be free. That mood is only enhanced by the second page, where the woman moves around the room, like a caged animal.

Evidently she's trying to fight this primal urge, since her next move is to her mirror, where it appears she is trying to gather her strength for what must come next. And on Page 3, we see what she is about to do: She sheds her clothes, frees her hair from the braid, and stands bared before the silent full moon before, on Page 4, she climbs out onto the roof, only a leap away from the life that has been keeping her caged in.

And then, in the last panel, we see her running away, liberated, a wolf.

The art tells the story beautitfully without relying on any words, and I have to say that I'm hooked and eager to see the next part of the story, even though I won't be sharing this with Evangeline any time soon. (Perhaps it's prudish, but I'm reluctant to show nudes in art to an 8-year-old, however well-drawn or sculpted they are, even when the nudes are done as tastefully as this.)

Only one point really troubles me: Though it's easy enough to guess what happened, given the full moon, the jump between the last two panels on Page 4 is rather sudden. Perhaps that's to show the sudden burst toward freedom, away from the confines of the house and all it represents? I'm still wondering if an intervening panel, showing her leaping from the porch roof might be in order.

Walks in the Rain recently graduated from art school, and I think it's evident from the work on this page that she has a lot of talent. I can't wait to see buy first graphic novel when it comes out.

Art, incorporated into the church

You know, I think my church is actually getting to the point that it's becoming some place neat to go on Sunday.

Don't get me wrong. It's been a good church for a while now. If it weren't, I don't think we'd have been going there for the past year-and-a-half or so that we've been attending. The worship always has been decent, if a trifle on the loud side; the preaching has almost always been pretty good to excellent; and the people have always been real, in our experience. It's a decent place to attend and be involved, and it reminds me in a lot of ways of the late, lamented Community Gospel Church, which was the last place we attended that we really enjoyed.

But The Point is becoming more than a good place to attend church. It's starting to become some place that's really interesting to go.

The big thing is the art. Actual art. Most churches I've attended the last 18 years or so paid lip service to art but didn't really embrace artistic expression unless it was "appropriate," which means that it's sanitized, prepackaged, not upsetting, not offensive, and is either by Thomas Kincade or is just otherwise uninteresting to look at or create. If it doesn't make people feel good about themselves and about Christ, it doesn't belong in church is the philosophy I think most churches operate on when it comes to art.

I've been pushing for more use of the arts at The Point, to the point that last year I convinced the leadership team it would be a good idea to create a worship station for a few weeks where people could come up and paint as much or as little as they wanted during the service. It was a neat idea, everyone agreed, but it didn't work well. About the only people to paint were the kids, and the pictures painted were (no joke) cute fluffy sheep, a cross or two, and something that might have been grass.

Back around Easter, they revisited the idea slightly by asking four different artists to paint whatever they wanted, on their own canvases, during the service. (Evangeline was one of the artists asked, which of course I enjoyed tremendously, as her father.)

The last few weeks, that sort of thing has been a fixture at both our downtown and suburban congregations. In addition to the band leading everyone in worship and the preacher doing his thing, there's been a painter working on a painting during the service, of paintings that were thematically related to the service but not explicitly religious. 

This morning, when the sermon was about Hanukkah, a woman painted a cluster of candles. In the downtown service, for the theme of Hope, the artist painted a hand holding a winged sphere. ("Hope is that thing with feathers, as Emily Dickinson, although his finished painting looked something like a golden snitch from Harry Potter.) When the theme was Faith, the painting was of a blindfolded woman being led by the hand. And the paintings have been display on subsequent weeks.

Last week our downtown service included interpretive dance as part of the worship service.

The worship team, which has been a little too heavy on guitars -- three of them, to be specific, with two of them electrics -- for my taste, is branching out. The team at each congregation includes someone who provides vocals and vocals alone, and downtown the worship band now includes a flutist. As a result, the worship is being transformed.

I guess you can tell why I'm getting excited about this church. It's taking a step beyond what's traditional, what's expected -- or perhaps it's taken a step beyond what's expected, back to what's traditional, since the Church traditionally was the significant patron of the arts for the longest time.

And I'm seeing a church leadership that's willing to take risks. At the downtown service tonight, two other people and I delivered a sucker-punch drama that had everyone's full attention and provided a deeply attentive audience when the pastor got up to preach.

We're working through Advent right now, with the sermon this week on joy. Our drama began when Jonathan got up to read Luke's account of the angelic visitation to the shepherds. He had just read the point that the angels began singing their hosannas and Gloria-in-Excelsis-Deos when someone in the congregation snorted loudly and derisively, the sort of snort I've used once or twice when I heard a preacher claim that the book of Job mentions dinosaurs.

No one who wasn't in on the drama knew this was coming. For the next minute or so, everyone in the congregation had the look of the proverbial deer caught in the headlights as Glorianne talked about how uninvolved she was in worship, and that while it's a great story that angels came to shepherds at night, it doesn't really match her experience at all. 

Everyone was stunned, first at the impropriety of interrupting like that and then (from some of the expressions I saw) at her willingness to articulate something they all could relate to but would never think of sharing.

Following the script, but a little uncertainly because Glorianne hadn't given him the cues he had been expecting, Jonathan tried to explain something about the joy not being in angels' presence but in following God, and then I lit into him for throwing around the idea of joy when he has no idea what he's talking about, nor does just about anyone with our casual, drive-by Christmastime religion. 

And for a closer, we tied it all in to the poverty that's very real and very present in our city, and probably got the attention of the homeless people who come to our services each week.

(The associate pastor, knowing it was a drama, leaned over to the fellow next to him and said, "Boy, this is awkward." The other fellow nodded mutely, and said, strained, "You're telling me.")

It was a set-up, admittedly, a piece of experimental theater where the audience doesn't know where they end and the actors begin, but it had the effect we intended. The lead pastor started talking, and I think he did an excellent job addressing the issues we raised. Afterward, everyone was talking about the drama and what was said afterward.

Through our sucker-punch drama, we succeeded at doing something important. We spoke to people about real pain, real disappointment, real frustration, and then about real joy.

I love this church.

Reverse influence of children on parents

In our house, sometimes the water flows uphill.

The principles of influence generally apply the way they always have, and you can safely say about the girls, "Oh, she takes after her mother that way" or "She gets that from her father." I take great pride in Evangeline's burgeoning interest in Greek mythology, and there's no doubt that my wife appreciates the relish Rachel has for the outdoors and nature. What parents don't love it when their children emulate them?

But lately, in my own life, I've seen that sometimes the tree doesn't grow too far from where the apple falls. Every once in a while, the water flows uphill.

Evangeline displayed a flair for artistic self-expression as early as 2 years old. Her interest waned for a few months, but particularly after we lost Isaac, she threw herself into drawing with abandon. We enrolled her in courses at a nearby art academy after she turned 5, and she had her own art exhibit there a year later.

What's curious is how this has affected the others of us. I've noticed in the last few weeks that Rachel has started displaying previously unknown levels of interest in art, particularly when it comes to painting. Tuesday night she painted herself a rainbow with an unmistakable bow shape to it, and when she draws, she's paying more attention to detail than ever before. She's spending more time on her art, and getting better every day. She's becoming an artist.

So am I. On Monday I asked the art instructor enough questions about Evangeline's art supplies that she told me I should just start taking lessons myself. I've noticed that my knowledge of different techniques, and my level of effort, have shot well past the stick-figure level where they effectively lingered for twenty-odd years.

In order to jumpstart Evangeline on the cover for her Roald Dahl research project, I drew my own sloppy copy and was reasonably impressed with the results. I'll never show at the Guggenheim or the Museum of Modern Art, but with a little effort and some coaching, I might actually turn out to be half-decent. It's a shocker.

The real shocker, though, has been musically. All the way through high school and college, I heard from my more musically attuned friends that I should give my vocal chords and their ears a rest whenever I felt the urge to sing. I had played the tuba for six years, and had been seated ahead of the all-state honors band player, but the general consensus of my friends was that I would do everyone a favor if I just left music to the musicians.

Generally speaking, I have. Even setting aside the question of vocals, there's not much demand for tubists in any sort of small-band capacity, I don't think I even remember half the valve combinations anymore, and I've always considered the time requirements for learning to play a new instrument to be too unwieldy at this point in my life.

As fate would have it, about two weeks ago, Evangeline started pleading for piano lessons. I had been trying to teach her piano from a music book during kindergarten, with mixed success, since I had no idea how to play it myself, and homeschooling texts are notorious for claiming how easy it is to teach a children a language or knowledge base that you haven't mastered yourself. (Mind, it's not impossible, but it is a lot of work, and it requires humility since you have to learn alongside your child, instead of imparting things from your own experience.)

But Evangeline was persistent, so I asked a friend who plays keyboards for his church if he would be willing to give it a shot. Rob, who is trained in elementary music education, took a different approach from the theory-scales-songs progression I recall from school. It's more like getting the kids to "think musically," and letting everything else follow. Professor Harold Hill may have been a con man with his "76 Trombones" and "Trouble in River City," but I have to say, I like Rob's approach just fine.

He taught Evangeline exactly one note, C natural, and told her to use that as the starting point for any song she wants to sing. After she matches her voice to that note, she then finds the next corresponding note on the keyboard, and then the next, and so on, until she has learned to play the whole song, entirely by ear. She undoubtedly will rearrange the song from its more familiar key in the process, but she's training her ears and fingers to match the notes she plays with what she sings.

Once she has learned to play two or three songs, we're supposed to call Rob for her second lesson. Practice, in the meantime, is at her pace and set by her level of interest, although we encourage her to practice and try to redirect her when she starts wandering off. (Forcing the issue with regimented daily practice times of 30 minutes a piece, I'll attest, leads to resentment, frustration, and not picking up the bloody instrument again once you graduate, so it's safe to consider it counterproductive.)

Rob insisted up front that he would not accept payment of any sort, since he simply enjoys seeing others learn to play, and is not trying to turn her into a concert pianist. That's a lucky thing for us, since Evangeline has already lost most of her interest in the piano, despite her initial enthusiasm.

But if Evangeline has lost interest, I've gained it. I already have figured out how to play some fairly simple children's songs like "Mary had a Little Lamb" and "Twinkle Little Star," which Rachel loves to hear me play; and "Majesty," a praise-and-worship chorus popular in charismatic churches in the late 1980s. I'm now working on "Holy, Holy, Holy," a more complicated and theologically deeper song that has been a church mainstay for ages.

I'm doing a decent job and one day soon may even be able to play our keyboard for our family devotions time, at least for one or two songs. I doubt I'll ever lead worship at church, and I'll certainly never play at Carnegie Hall, but I'm experiencing a renaissance in an area of artistry I never knew I had, and that alone makes it worth the price of admission.

And since both Rachel and Evangeline see my renewed interest and enthusiasm for the piano and drawing, I've a feeling these things will be a part of our family for years to come. If the water continues to run uphill and the trees keep growing near where the apples fall, we're going to have quite a tidy little orchard before long.

the artist in the news

One of the advantages of being a ten-year career journalist is that I know how to write a decent news release, even if I figure the chances of anyone picking it up are pretty slim. Maybe she'll get mentioned in one of those "Around the Town" fluff pieces in the newspaper. Who can tell?

Here follows the news release:

NOVA BASTILLE ARTIST SHOWS WORK AT HOOVER POINT GALLERY
At 6 years old, she is youngest artist to exhibit at Academy of Art of Hoover Point

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

HOOVER POINT, Iowa (Feb. 1, 2006) -- Original art work by Evangeline Learn will remain on display at the Academy of Art of Hoover Point and Gallery through February.

Learn, 6, has been enrolled formally at the academy since the start of 2005, when she began taking drawing lessons. Since then, she has been enrolled a total five sessions at the academy, in addition to participating in summer art camp at the academy last year. She drew all 10 of the featured pictures in the exhibition as part of her course work at the academy.

She is the youngest artist to exhibit at the gallery, by 11 years.

The exhibit began with an opening Jan. 28, during which Learn explained her choice of medium for each drawing and discussed her inspiration and technique for each. Fifteen members of Learn's family and friends attended.

"Evangeline's skill, while it's always been good for her age, has blossomed at the art academy," said David Learn, 35, her father. "We're grateful to the academy for not only encouraging her skill but giving her the confidence to display her art in a public setting like this for other people to see."

A Nova Bastille resident, Learn lives with her parents and younger sister. She attends first grade at Gary Barker Charter School in Nova Bastille. As could be expected, she found the attention to her artwork rewarding and encouraging.

"I'm going to keep drawing for the rest of my life," said Learn, who sold five prints of her artwork after the show.

The Academy of Art of Hoover Point and Gallery offers art instruction in the classic studio tradition, under the directorship of Ana Soto-Canino of Hoover Point. Located at 727 Raritan Ave. for the past seven years, it offers courses in drawing, painting, sculpture and art appreciation, and hosts regular art exhibits of its students' work.

To schedule a visit to the gallery or for more information about the academy, call (abc) def-ghij.

On the web:
http://www.google.com

Artist's bio from today's gallery showing

Evangeline Learn has been doing art since she was old enough to pick up crayons and scribble on her father's notebook. Her initial work, done almost exclusively in the media of Crayola crayons and magic markers, reveals a strong postmodern influence and communicates the existential crises familiar to toddlers everywhere.

By the time she had turned 3, however, Evangeline had mastered the technique behind curved lines and complete shapes, and soon began a period noted for its use of familiar story characters, with works like "The Big Bad Spotted Wolf" and "Little Spotted Riding Hood," as well as avant-garde pieces like "The Scissors Family at Home." Cut-outs and collages soon followed.

Art from her next period is noted for a strong Disney influence, with works like "Sleeping Beauty Descending a Staircase" and "Sleeping Beauty Holding a Broom." Little Green Men from the "Toy Story" movies also became a common motif during this period, and at times Evangeline would join these disparate elements in innovations like "LGM Cinderella."

Evangeline has been learning art in a classic setting since she attended her first drop-in session at the art academy when she was five years old. She is now six. During the past fourteen months, she has explored new media, including wash pencils, inks, pastels and charcoal. She also has gained familiarity with artistic techniques like shading and perspective, and has broadened her horizons with a wide array of drawing tools.

Evangeline's artwork is held in several private collections across the United States, including specifically commissioned pieces of work in the Washington, D.C., area that later were reprinted as limited-edition postcards. The assortment of work on display here at the gallery comes from Evangeline's personal collection.

Although this is Evangeline's first formal art show, work of hers previously has been displayed at invitation-only venues such as The Refrigerator Door, The Bedroom Wall, and Other Places Around the House.

Evangeline would like to thank her parents and sister for their unwavering support as she develops her artistic skills, and gratefully acknowledges her debt to Miss Ana, who has taught her so much. She is honored to have her first art show here at the studio.

the artist in the spotlight

You'll have to forgive me if I sound a little proud of Evangeline here, but if I do, it's because I am.

Evangeline's art teacher at the Academy of Art of Hoover Point and Gallery has invited Evangeline to exhibit her original artwork at the gallery. This isn't in conjunction with other students or a tack-on to a larger exhibit that includes other exhibitors. This is an honest-to-goodness art exhibit of Evangeline's work, and she has it all to herself.

The exhibit kicks off with an opening reception from 3 to 5:30 p.m. Jan. 28, where people can come and go as fits their schedule and munch on age-appropriate snacks while they're there. Evangeline's instructor, who runs the studio and gallery, gave me a guide to hosting an art exhibit that suggests wine and cheese or something similar. I'm guessing grapes, crackers and other nonsugary snack foods are a good idea.

In all seriousness, I have my work cut out for me. In the next two weeks, I have to sort through Evangeline's work with her, pick out the ten best pieces of art to display, frame them, help set them up at the gallery, get invitations to all her friends and other people we want to have come, write up brief descriptions of each work, create a brief amusing or serious bio, avoid mentioning the exhibit to people who are going to think I'm putting on airs about how great my daughter is and continue with my normal litany of chores and responsibilities like housekeeping and helping Evangeline with her homework. (Plus, I want to get some honest-to-goodness writing done each day.)

Still, as you can probably tell, I'm excited about this. In my more fanciful moments, I have visions of an artist's bio years from now that begins, "Evangeline Learn held her first art show when she was only six years old" but I'm not so completely caught up in this that I can't see the other side of the equation. Essentially, for no fee, we're going to be advertising the art academy to a group of Evangeline's friends and classmates. The ones who actually come to the opening will get to see the academy, their parents will get some of the literature, and some of them may even start taking lessons. So it benefits the academy.

On the other hand, from what the teacher told me, she's never actually done a display of any work by children before, and she's said in the past that she considers Evangeline to be her finest student in that age group. And if Evangeline's a good artist for her age, a lot of it's because of the classical instruction she's received at this studio. So if the teacher wants to use an art show to attract some of Evangeline's friends, I'm fine with that.

merchandising as an art

Christianity Today has a good article online comparing the new "Chronicles of Narnia" movie to "Calvin and Hobbes," and how the creators of each handled the thorny merchandising question when it comes to their respective cats and other casts of characters. Watterson never allowed his creation to be cheapened with merchandising, since his feeling was that the use of their likenesses in ohther media diminishes or alters their significance in the comics medium.

And really, he has a point, doesn't he? Would Calvin be so quintessentially boy if you could find him on mouse pads, coffee mugs and what have you? Would Hobbes be uniquely Calvin's pet tiger if every child in the universe could have owned one just like him? Of course not. And hasn't Calvin's image been tarnished by the unauthorized merchadise? He's been locked into Adam Sandler juvenile humor mode by all those bootleg window stickers that show him peeing on other car manufacturer logos. Lost in there is the real essence of a boiy, his imagination, his other forms of mischief, and his poignancy. In the same way, the majesty and grandeur of Aslan has been reduced because of my daughter's ability to play with him and make him do whatever she wants. "Not a tame lion," indeed.

I've always have been impressed with Watterson's commitment to the sanctity of his art. Both he and the Christianity Today writer make an excellent point about how the medium is part of the message, and using the merchandising medium affects the message in the other media as well.

Things like this make me glad that we don't get TV signals in our house. There's a lot of merchandising the girls just aren't aware of, and that makes things a lot easier. We're not overrun in junk like we would be, and the experience of a movie or book isn't cheapened as easily or as quickly for them as it is for their peers.

It's like Evangeline with Spider-man. She has two sets of sheets, a T-shirt, a sweatshirt, a backpack, a winter hat, a place mat, sneakers, a video game plug-and-play set, and at least one coloring book. There's probably more stuff I'm not even thinking of. She's seen the movies and even read a couple comic books, but a lot of her association with Spider-man has been tied up in the merchandising and the times she's had to assert her right to like Spider-man at school, where her classmates have told her that Spider-man's just for boys. Spider-man is a material asset to her, rather than a moral story about responsibility and how a moment's inaction or refusal to care about someone else's problems can lead to real problems of our own.

the artist in her element

I took a trip to an utterly alien world today on behalf of my daughter. I took her to the art supply store.

Evangeline is taking weekly art lessons at the Academy of Art of Hoover Point, where she's learning the foundations of art in a classic setting, or something like that. At 5 years old, she's learned to draw with perspective, to use shading, and a few other techniques I don't understand. She's done triptychs, inking, wash pencils and a ton of stuff I never learned until eighth grade in the public school system, if even then.

Today it was time to buy supplies for her third-level drawing class, and I found myself walking up and down the aisles of Pearl, trying to figure out what the heck all these different graphite pencils were for. We had to buy five of them, all with a different number-letter name, and to keep myself amused, I kept wisecracking "2B, or not 2B?" as though it was the funniest joke in the world and there was anything greater than a snowball's chance in Haiti that the girls would get it.

Evangeline, of course, treated the entire trip with the utmost gravity. Normally she complains that she's tired, or that it's too heavy, if I ask her to carry so much as a grape. On Monday, she carried the handcart all around the store, and never complained once when we had to walk all the way back across the store because I was going down the list in order, and didn't realize that we had to buy light tracing paper when I was picking out 80-pound weight acid-free drawing paper.

What was truly impressive to me was when she took it upon herself to educate me about the different kinds of graphite used in pencils, and their different uses. When I wondered out loud why on earth an art student would need a blender, let alone why it would be only ¾ of an inch thick -- thinking of course of the kitchen appliance that we don't have anyway -- Evangeline immediately explained not only what blenders are for (something to do with the edge of a picture), but she told me what they're made of, what they look like, and pointed them out to me on the hook.

At art class, Evangeline continued to work on a liquid graphite drawing of a fish. (I'm not sure how the graphite is liquid, but I guess it's a soft graphite that is made even softer with water. Am I right?) She loves this class, and her teacher has told me that Evangeline is one of the most talented young children she has -- doubly impressive, since Evangeline is also possibly the youngest. I can't help but feel a little amused when I consider that her art classes at school probably involve crayons, scissors and construction paper.

The art academy is great for her, precisely because the instructors expect so much. The higher you set the bar, the more the students'll achieve.

if thine ear offends thee

So I'm one of the organizers of Arts in The Park, an upcoming arts festival over in Highland Park.

Last night, at one of our nearly-there meetings, we had a brief discussion about the live entertainment we're trying to schedule for two stages. We're down at least one, possibly two, acts because of a cancellation, and we're trying to find some bands to perform on the day of the festival. During the meeting, one of the other committee members mentioned that an R&B/gospel band had expressed interest in performing, and there ensued an awkward discussion about whether an explicity religious band would be appropriate.

Now I'll be the first to admit that most Christian bands aren't appropriate for concerts outside church, mostly because they stink. The melodies are flat and uninteresting, the choruses are uninspiring and dull, and the time spent listening to them could be put to better use weeding the garden. That's not what we were discussing -- in fact, I have no idea if anyone on the committee even know what the band sounds like -- no, what was expressed was concern that a religious band might offend festival attendees.

This may seem appalling since I'm so deeply religious, but I really didn't say much at the time. Having given it some thought now that I'm home, I wrote an e-mail to the group's Yahoo! list to voice my concern that we are considering not going with a group just because their lyrics are religious.

I can understand the concern about people taking offense, but I don't think the reactions people might have should be a consideration in whom we invite to perform and who we do not. It may sound a bit facile to put it this way, but no one is being forced to listen to any particular band; except for vendors and some of the volunteers, people will be free to come and go from the festival as they wish, to move around the festival, and to do any number of other things that will remove them from earshot of any bands they don't want to hear.

And really, using a person's beliefs, rather than the quality and nature of their music, as a litmus test for acceptability seems especially odious to me. It's the nature of art to explore themes and to express the artist's inner beliefs and thoughts; I hope it would be unthinkable for anyone to ask someone not to display artwork that expresses her faith, whether in God, Christ, Buddha or the importance of eating fresh fruits and vegetables. By the same token, I would hope that we would not want to discriminate against hiring a live performer simply because their lyrics or musical structures reflect their beliefs.

There are, of course, any number of other perfectly legitimate reasons to reject a band, some of which may apply in this case. What concerns me, though, is that we were actually discussing making that decision based on the religious content of their songs.

The artist finds her moment of homecoming

For about six months this year, Evangeline took art lessons over at the Art Academy of Hoover Point.

Today I had to zip by the academy to pick up some papers from the director for an arts festival I'm helping to prepare. I'm expecting a quick in-and-out affair.

Well, as soon as we pull into the parking lot, Evangeline lit up so brightly I could see it in the front seat. The car was no sooner parked than she had unbuckled her seat belt. By the time I had Rachel unbuckled, Evangeline was not only out of the car, she was ready to go inside.

Rachel and I got inside just in time to see Evangeline coming back from the rear of the art academy, where she had washed her hands and was now all prepped for a class that she wasn't signed up for.

The art director saw the look of dismay on my face and busted out laughing.

What could I do? It was a drop-in period where anyone can come in from off the street and do an art project. I picked up the papers I needed, then Rachel and I went off and left Evangeline to enjoy art class for the next two hours.

The summer program is much different from what I had expected, pricingwise, timewise and schedulewise, so Evangeline also appears to have wormed her way into regular art lessons over August, too. But I'll be damned if I'm taking her to a jewelry store when she's a teenager.

Discovering the local art academy

On Monday night we discovered the Hoover Point Art Academy.

The teacher had me sold in just 10 minutes, not only with her ability to deal respectfully with a 5-year-old, but also for her ability to revolutionize Evangeline's approach to drawing. We'll be attending drop-in lessons once a week for the next several weeks, but after that we will enroll her in a regular art class at the gallery.

The lesson began as Ana, the instructor and studio owner, asked Evangeline to draw a picture. She chose Mulan, her favorite Disney character of the moment, and with the color pencils drew the way one usually does with a pencil. She drew the outline of Mulan's head, her hair and her outfit, adding little details like Mulan's eyes, nose, mouth and eyebrows.

Ana showed Evangeline a different approach to drawing, drawing lines together and deliberately, as if she were using a crayon; and then had her draw a school of smiling fish.

After that, she had Evangeline draw water around the fish using a mix of green, blue and purple wash pencils. Then -- this will be obvious to artists, but it was something new to me -- she had Evangeline dab the picture very lightly with the tip of a wet brush, and the washables turned to paint, creating a nice water effect.

I had never seen this kind of color pencil before, and was almost as taken with it as Evangeline was.

The whole session took about an hour, but held Evangeline's rapt attention the entire time. As I said on my way out, the downside is that from now on, Evangeline's going to tell me that we have the wrong paper, the wrong pencils, that I'm not taping her paper to a cardboard backing, and so on.

But I'm pleased. I think she's genuinely gifted artistically, and I'm excited to give her the chance to pursue that gift and develop it.

black jesus

I'm tired of seeing the white, blond-haired Jesus, but who isn't? I want to see black Jesus some more.

White blond Jesus everywhere you look. He's in the Sunday school material, even though Jesus wasn't blonde. I taught at a Christian school in Bethlehem, Pa., and he was in all the Bible class materials, even though all but two of my students were Hispanic or African-American.

White blonde Jesus had a nice run, but let's give him a break. Let's remind ourselves that Jesus is for other people too, and not just us.

In Haiti, at the Baptist Haiti Mission in Fermathe, I saw a picture of the Holy Family in the art museum there. In this picture, a black Joseph was teaching a white Jesus the family trade while a white Mary was busily at work nearby. It was a very Haitian scene, except for the white people.

That's the damage the white Jesus can do; people forget that he's like them, and instead they see him as like another people, the missionary or the American forces. He's a foreigner, an outisder; and not someone who knows what it's like for them.

I do enjoy the other-ethnic pictures I've seen. The National Cathedral in Port-au-Prince has pictures of the black Jesus at different times of his ministry: his baptism, raising Lazarus from the dead the Last Supper.

The funniest part of the black Jesus is that he's usually pictured with a white Judas.



Copyright © 2004 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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drawing monsters

I'm not an artist, but I can imagine the monsters in my mythology books must have posed some challenges for the artists. Take the hydra. How easy can it be to place nine heads on a single creature and have it appear to be natural? How do you find space for nine necks on the same piece of paper?

And yet a nine-headed hydra must be easy compared to some of the monsters the Greeks came up with. Remember Typhon? He was one of the creatures who opposed Zeus when the gods overthrew the Titans. If I remember correctly, he had 100 heads, and some of his siblings had even more.

I wonder how the heads reached an agreement. Did they argue back and forth like the three-headed knight in "Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail," was it a simple majority rules, or did each head control a different part of the body?

Then there was hundred-eyed Argus. I can only imagine the headaches he got with that many eyes. And can you imagine what would happen if he were cross-eyed or some of his eyes got glaucoma? His optometrist must have loved sending *him* bills.

(I would wager he was available to watch Io for Hera because he never had a girlfriend. After all, would you want to date someone who poked you in the eye every time they hugged you?)