MAKE A STATEMENT

The next day in art, Ms. Donatello had a new assignment for us.

“I want you to think about making a statement with your art,” she said.

“Huh?” Felicia Tollery said. “I don’t get it.”

I was glad someone else didn’t.

“What do you mean, a statement?” I asked. “Like, ‘I’m hungry’?” (Art was right before lunch, and I was starving.)

“Not exactly,” Ms. D said. “Art isn’t just about images. It’s also about ideas. It’s about saying something to the world. Maybe even changing the world for the better.”

Then she showed us some famous examples, so we could see who we weren’t going to live up to on this one.

The first was a painting called American Gothic. I always think that name sounds like there should be vampires in there, or at least people wearing black and listening to weird music. But it’s more like the opposite—just some farmer and his wife standing in front of a house. (Ms. D said the house was the gothic part, but I didn’t get that either.)

“It looks like an ordinary portrait, doesn’t it? But the artist, Grant Wood, was also making his own kind of statement,” Ms. Donatello said. “It’s about the strength and dignity of Americans at a difficult time. These people represent survivors.”

This was the kind of thing we talked about in real art school, when I went to Cathedral and Airbrook. Ms. D kept saying she wanted us to think BIG, and I guess you don’t get much bigger than changing the world.

The question was—how? What was my statement going to be? And why would anyone care, anyway?

When I looked up again, there was another slide on the screen. It was a creepy-looking black-and-white painting.

“What did Pablo Picasso have in mind here?” Ms. Donatello asked. “What statement do you think Guernica is making?”

And I thought, Good question.

But then I started to see it. There were faces, and people kind of hidden in that painting. Some of them looked like they were screaming, and some were more like ghosts.

“They don’t look too happy,” I said.

“No. They’re not,” Ms. Donatello said. “This painting is about war. Picasso was using his artistic genius to speak out about events in the Spanish Civil War of 1937.

“So you see, a statement can be quiet, like American Gothic. Or it can be loud and forceful, like the images in Guernica,” Ms. D said. “It can also be just as straightforward as this.”

“That’s kind of goofy,” Ava Bartlett said.

“It’s also a classic piece of art,” Ms. D said. “And nobody can mistake Mr. Indiana’s message here, am I right?”

She showed us some other examples after that, but I already had plenty to think about with this one. Like what my “statement” was supposed to be. And how to say something that was going to “change the world.” And maybe most important of all—what to have for lunch.

Because who can think about changing the world on an empty stomach?