The Blue Horse

Yesterday the color blue ran away from a photoshoot in television land and visited a famous horse in a painting. Then it pushed aside the "crayonboxtwins" and shouted,
"My Turn."

*****

My art teacher in high school must have been at the end of a long, boring career in 1956. Tall, thin, and gray, he walked into our classroom once a week and told a story. When he was finished he asked us to draw a big rectangle on paper and divide it into four parts.

“Draw the four scenes you like most in the story.”

As far as I remember, this was the only instruction we received. Careful not to cross the dividing lines, we penciled miniatures of giants and castles and captured maidens. Then we colored the figures we had drawn, filling the smallest of spaces with tiny dabs from a fine brush. We finished the assignment by writing a title and our name above our four visions of medieval pilferings, ransackings, and damsel hijackings. At the end of the hour the art teacher collected our “works of art,” nodded, and left the room.

My memory says no, but we must have reviewed our drawings the next week. There must have been progress. I must have learned something. Perspective? Balance? Or maybe I just learned to listen to the storyteller. With a small degree of sarcasm I tell myself now that I probably learned to stay within the lines.

An artist friend of mine once pounded the table when I carefully drew my way across a very small field of wildflowers. Did he think he could blur my well-defined universe by shaking the kitchen table? A few months later he went a bit mad when he caught me going over a pencil drawing with ink.

“Let it go,” he said and tossed the mechanical pen into the trashcan. “You’ve got to loosen up.”

I tried. Though I never crossed the line to outright innovation, I attempted minor revolutions. Pouring irregular rivulets of paint on canvas. Disfiguring my mannequin’s face with an extra eye. Splashing primary colors as if my life depended on it. But after those crazy moments I always revert to postcard size drawings of miniature scenes, scenes that are carefully accentuated within the perimeters of a finite plane.

I guess I feel safe in my little drawing spaces, but my craving for bold statements is always present. I am not good at producing them on paper or canvas, but I admire them wherever I see them. A few years ago, when I sorted through and gave away a third of my books, I found a small volume of just such statements. A friend in high school had given that book to me. It made me remember the time when I first came to love bold expressions. How I came to love the color blue.

Next to our classroom was another room with another art teacher. He moved quickly, spoke fast, and I sometimes saw him sweep chalk across the blackboard in long unruly lines. I heard that he liked abstract art and that he didn’t allow pencils. I imagined him saying things like:

“Paint what you want, just make it colorful.”

One day a poster of a blue horse was taped to his blackboard. It was a horse that defied horse color. It displayed a gentle disposition even though its features had been painted with bold strokes. The mountains behind the horse – big blue and yellow and red mounds of color – seemed to impose their solid shapes beyond the limits of the poster. I can’t remember the steps from that blue horse to my friend’s present, but the little book contained paintings by Franz Marc, the man who had imagined the blue horse. He belonged to a group named “Der Blaue Reiter,” (The Blue Rider) the avant-garde of Expressionism. Franz Marc became my favorite painter and the Blue Horse is still my favorite painting.