A Lesson in the Surreal Inspires Magical Works

The first thing the kids didn’t believe was that blood dripped from sliced watermelon.

Oddly, the simple wood chairs flying straight up into the air posed no problem.

Art is like that. Kids are like that.

The painting with the watermelon and chairs is “La Noche de la Sandia,” by the Los Angeles artist Patssi Valdez and on display at the Carnegie Museum here.

The students are Melyssa Alcantar and Rick Reyes and Crystal Gutierrez and a host of other Rio Real School third-graders on a field trip, an outing that will challenge the way they see the world.

It will, of course, be much more than that.

So many of the academic rules they’ve learned by--control, neatness, the natural order of reality--will be dropped, suspended, useless. The world of the surreal, in this case a mystical vision in which fruit bleeds, will prevail.

And then what?

A sly Suzanne Bellah, the Carnegie’s director, won’t tell.

All the kids know is that they are, for the first time in their lives, in a museum. And that when Ms. Bellah is through engaging them on the subject of flying chickens, cactus that grows through walls, and what she calls other “strange things,” they will be asked to commit their own visions to paper.

But that’s when things get rough.

“Go ahead,” says Ms. Bellah, handing out paper and pencils. “Go all around the museum, and look at these magic paintings for an angel. Then draw an angel--any way you want. Copy an angel if you like.”

They do. Slowly.

And treacherously, for the pencils have no erasers. Neatness is impossible. The errant line must be accepted or slashed over with a darker line, a bolder stroke.

And all caution--no matter how much sweat is summoned over controlling the embryonic image--goes unredeemed.

“I messed up” is the refrain of numerous students.

Their call is answered by Ms. Bellah: “You can’t mess up. There are no mistakes. This is not a test. You are simply warming up your hands and your eyes for the real fun, downstairs.”

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More than 5,000 students from kindergarten through junior high school take this journey through the Carnegie each year. Most of them have never been to a museum. And most come from schools in which art education--particularly studio, hands-on art instruction--has been cut back for lack of money or is wanting for more teacher expertise.

So the Mervyn’s department store chain issues a grant to pay for much of the cost of the tours. Schools also donate $1 per student to the museum. And the investment is tightly focused to not only introduce art to the kids but to involve them in its creation.

It’s difficult to tell how such a program affects a child’s life. America today redeems practical skills in the marketplace, and leaner curriculums reflect that: It’s a get-a-job world that is, with increasing technological efficiencies, trickier and trickier to compete in.

More than anything, it’s a world of real bleeding hearts and real bleeding hands, not bleeding watermelons.

But you wouldn’t know that downstairs when Arla Crane’s third-grade class comes face-to-face with the woman they’ve been warming up for: Oxnard painter Suzanne Schecter.

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Schechter is swift, blunt, without condescension. She treats these students as adults. This is not surprising, however, as Schechter knows how intimidating art can be to the rest of us: She’s the provocative teacher of an adult class here called “Drawing for the Artistically Discouraged.”

But adults have that much more control to let go of, that much more baggage to shed. These 8-year-olds, primed into accepting bleeding fruit and faulty angels as legitimate forms of expression, are now showing signs of eagerness.

Schechter outlines the same wide-angled room as the Valdez painting upstairs and explains, without using the word perspective, how the artist is “a giant who removed the ceiling and looks down into the room.”

She goes on to explain that “real things in a picture is like real life, but when you connect magic to life--birds flying through crooked rooms, or anything you can think of--then you have a magic room.”

They are told to play giant and make a magic room. With pastel chalks and Scented Baby Fresh wipes to smear them into paint, they go at it.

Liliana Galvan is shy, hiding her drawing from anyone who chances a glimpse. Ted Taylor draws the room in amazingly accurate 3-D proportion, then drops a bicycle into it--to oohs and ahs. Crystal Gutierrez renders a dark vision, slashing and smearing the walls in haunting Franz Kline black seared by a lurid red window. Gerardo Alejandre’s symmetry is fearful: two hearts in a window, two balloons in another window, a star and a moon in yet another.

Suddenly, Liliana’s no longer shy. She pries her hands away to reveal a peaceful, sanctuary-like room with lime walls and a red cross outside her window, a red cross that fills the sky, commands the room, rules her world.

These kids clearly took Schechter to heart when she said: “Maybe if you draw it, it will happen.”

That, certainly, is magic. And that, certainly, is something powerful to carry through a modern life requiring so much more than reading, writing and arithmetic.