Zsuzsi Gartner - Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

Georgia was most taken with the goats-floating, soaring, violin-playing goats. “I wish I could fly,” she said, more pensively than her tender age warrants. Well, who doesn’t? (Do you suppose we could purchase posters of La baie des Anges for only $56.01 plus shipping or a boxed set of eight Chagall greeting cards online today if daydreamy little Marc Chagall had been in your grade one class, Miss Subramanium? Just a thought.)

I am an actuary by trade. My job involves evaluating risk. This has been ranked the number one low-stress occupation in the country, according to recent media reports, and I can attest to their veracity (which is why my dentist finds it so surprising that I grind my teeth in the night-bruxism, it’s called. That sounds like the name of an art movement, does it not? Something darkly male, something tantalizingly unkempt . My No. 14 and No. 19 molars have evidently suffered such irreparable damage that it threatens to alter the appearance of my jawline. I’m currently awaiting delivery of my custom-fitted mouthguard, my own nocturnal bite plate . This is the kind of excitement I have to look forward to these days, Miss Subramanium).

As both a professional and a parent, it is my job to calculate risks, not take them. Taking risks-that is the artist’s, and the child’s, job.

Your feet-on-the-ground dictum, or “rool,” as Georgia put it in her journal, is just the starting point. There is also your oft-stated desire that the children make their crayon strokes in one direction and one direction only, putting cross-hatching on the same criminal level as giving a classmate a wedgie. And snipping the erasers off the ends of their pencils so that they’re forced to confront their “mistakes”-I won’t even go there right now. What I would like to focus on is your insistence that a drawing is not complete until the child has filled in the background.

Can I call your attention to the Toronto painter Ronald Bloore? Most famous for his white-on-white paintings of the 1970s and ’80s, which he has said represent “freedom for the viewer,” Bloore is a master of texture. The aesthetic pleasure of these works lies in the very white space you claim to abhor. The intra-textural space is the image. (I came so close to buying a Bloore once at auction, but my husband, much like you, Miss Subramanium, could not see the value in the pristine expansiveness of the painting, calling it-I’m almost embarrassed to type the phrase lest you think he speaks like this in front of Georgia-“a wank job.” It could be that my husband was jealous. If you have seen photographs of Bloore in his middle years you would agree that he had a rakish quality, that airborne charisma of the rogue male artist confident in his abilities and able to draw people, namely women, effortlessly into his vortex. He is, at that age, a doppelgänger for my dentist. The resemblance is rather uncanny, save that my dentist does not dangle a cigarette between his fingers as he plies his trade.)

To focus so intently on the absence of colour. To trust the viewer to distinguish between different kinds of whiteness-between degrees of whiteness. There is a bold erotic charge to this deliberate withholding. Bloore himself once called art “a three-letter word.” Can you understand the rigour involved in denial, Miss Subramanium?

This is not to say that a child handing in a blank sheet of paper and calling it art should be met with cries of bravissimo! (although it would be rather clever), but that art is elastic and your insistence on mimetic drawings, complete with backgrounds, rather retrograde.

I can almost hear you sighing, Miss Subramanium. It isn’t my tendency to psychoanalyze, but it’s not difficult to imagine what this fear of white space implies. You don’t like to be alone, do you? Whiling away empty hours fills you with an unnameable terror, does it not? There are people who can help with this-God knows I have a list of contacts as long as my arm. Just say the word.

The point of art, Miss Subramanium, is in not meeting expectations. Ha! Yes, that is the point! I surprise even myself with this revelation. So Georgia, in “not yet meeting expectations,” is, in fact, at the top of her class. Art, and here I include dance, music, film, and belles lettres, is perhaps the only human activity where not meeting expectations corresponds with success, not failure.

And in a life full of almost continual, albeit inconsequential, disappointments, with others, with ourselves, in a life full of notable failure (to secure a date with Daryl Sawatsky for the high-school graduation dance; to place in the top percentile of your statistics class despite pulling enough all-nighters and popping enough bennies to fell an aurochs), this ability of the few to defy, to subvert, expectations gives the rest of us something to live for-vicariously, in the third person as it were.

In all fairness I should tell you that your self-referential habit when addressing the children has become a source of amusement at our house. Miss S. is getting frustrated over the level of the noise in the classroom. Miss S. needs someone to run to the office and get her some Tylenol 3s. Miss S. needs a minute to finish her text message to her ex-boyfriend. “Miss S. sounds likes Dobbie in Harry Potter ,” Georgia said the other day, and we shared a laugh, picturing you as the beleaguered house elf smashing yourself on the head with a desk lamp after one transgression or another. That actually brought some tears to my eyes. (My husband came to your defence; feathered earrings and patchouli-scented heavy-metal cotton Ts no doubt dangling like sugarplums over his head.)

Perhaps you come from a troubled home or even a troubled country, if your last name is any indication. It is not in my nature to pry. But your quest for order appears to me a manifestation of an obsessive need to wield complete control over your small fiefdom. The word martinet comes to mind. How am I as a parent to know that an ill-timed scrawl outside the lines won’t trigger a psychotic episode due to undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder; that you’re not above administering medieval forms of punishment? How am I to ascertain that my child is safe in your classroom, with its almost Pol Pot-ish rules about behaviour? What’s next, Miss Subramanium, a pile of polished skulls in the supply cupboard?

Can I call you Shayana, Miss Subramanium? Miss Subramanium is, after all, a mouthful, and so formal considering I am technically old enough to be your mother. As for Miss S.-well, I’m hardly one of your little charges.

There was a time, Shayana, when I wore my era’s equivalent to your dreamcatchers and rebellious T-shirts. I had aspirations. I was giddy with my own sexual power-a simulacrum of power fed by the illusions of youth and a type of wan beauty, but power of a kind nonetheless. Every day brought a new opportunity for adventure. Did I imagine then that I would spend the bulk of my days, year upon year, in a small office cubicle with an Excel spreadsheet on the monitor in front of me, a photograph of a laughing girl on a portable potty as my screen saver, and on my desk a miniature inflatable punching bag (a Secret Santa gift from my colleagues) of the existential figure from Munch’s The Scream ? Not for a moment. I was going to be an artist.

I had an advantage over my fellow students at the art college-I could see voices as colours and shapes, and without the aid of any psychotropic. As long as someone was talking, I had a palette to work with. The nasal Upper Canada monotone of my life-class instructor produced oddly compelling anorexic oatmeal-streaked buttocks and breasts (you may imagine how this annoyed the model, who was rather voluptuous and rosy hued, but the sketches earned me instant recognition as an iconoclast). My roommate’s throaty smoker’s laugh gave me a series of large canvas magma flares in reds, oranges, and basalt. The melancholy-flecked sound of my Estonian landlady talking to her daughter over the telephone, a small umbral gem.