WHAT ART IS

Steph Addams slams the door behind me whenever she comes into my room, announcing her presence. Normally she sinks her butt on some chair waiting for me to finish whatever patch of color I'm working on, but this time, when I glance sideways to her, she's almost running towards me.

"I've been trying to call you," she says between short breaths, "we've all been trying to."

"I was here." Putting down both the brush and the palette, I leave my place in front of the easel and follow her to the sofa at the opposite corner of the room. That is one of the few pieces of furniture I have in there, besides a chair and what used to be a dressing table for cosmetics, now with acrylics instead of eyeshadow and pencils instead of earrings. I kept the mirror on it, however, and the lights around it. The more light in the room, the better.

I do have a bed too, somewhere under a stack of canvases - newly-bough blank ones and, majorly, scraps. Finished paintings have a different pile or leaning against a wall.

My best-friend leans her head back on the couch, looking upwards at the white ceiling. "You're always here, I know. But you wouldn't want to miss the news." Her legs are crossed, knees bent so her rip in her jeans becomes even more obvious. Just before resuming she turns to me, her eyes meeting mine. "Allen signed you up for his life's jackpot."

That means another contest to bring money to the school, another competition to promote the place that birthed so many artists. Nothing surprising there, nothing interesting enough to make her run up all the stairs in my house.

Seeing the obvious confusion on my face, Steph wastes no time to add, "Leonardo."

And for a moment I feel the air lump in my lungs.

Because I don't want to go to LEONARDO. Because I can't go to LEONARDO.

It shouldn't even exist, but it does and that bothers me very much.

The rest of the world and I have agreed to disagree over many things, but most of all over art. Art is da Vinci, art is Michaelangelo, art is Rembrandt, art is van Gogh, art is Klimt, art is Kahlo, art is Picasso, art is Dali. Art isn't the lines your mascara makes when thrown at a brick wall, art isn't the splashed design colored water makes when dropped on cardboard.

Art is Beethoven, art is Mozart, art is Chopin, art is Tchaikovsky, art is Bach, art is Andrew Lloyd Webber, art is John Williams, art is Hans Zimmer, art is Howard Shore. Art isn't scraping nails against a chalkboard repeteadly until it forms a rhythm.

Art is good.

This guy that I've once been... close to, who's doing Dramatic Arts, once told me about his choice of plays to seek a role in and how life had already shown him enough filth, had given him a drunkard dad and a teen mom, had worn him through cigarettes in which he still had no idea what was and beds of people he'd not seen before and never since, and every day he could look out on the window to see a botched rhinoplasty or an idiot running over an old lady with his Jeep. So, when it comes to art, he chooses to look for the better. I remember his face, his eyes fixed on something far away on the sky - which was so very blue that particular day - and I remember his kiss on the corner of my mouth just before he told me that a servant in Julius Caesar was the kind of gold that no rapist role in any blockbuster movie could ever compare to.


Then there was another thing he said that stuck with me and it was something I've always felt, but was never able to verbalize the right way. No surprise there, in words eluding a painter just like colors would fail an actor. Cole said, "I gotta give it to the people seeing what I've seen." I liked him a lot, especially knowing he understood things like that.

Art is also what you give.

And it's art when what you give, you give with a meaning.

Competitions like LEONARDO don't look at that. They award people painting for the heck of it, but no real artist creates just for the heck of it. And the dare for this year is to reproduce Mona Lisa for half a million dollars or something. Not the actual Mona Lisa, but a portrait - or whatever people consider a portrait - good enough to rival it.

This is why I don't go there.

I don't do contemporany art, don't draw in sand, don't paint with blood, and to me, a portrait is a portrait. Mona Lisa is Mona Lisa. The Girl with the Pearl Earring is the Girl with the Pearl Earring. The Lady in Gold is the Lady in Gold.

I know I don't have a place in that contest. And I don't pick fights I don't stand a chance at winning.