To Be an Artist

I am spending this part of my summer working at Penn State's Summer Reading Camp.  My group is comprised of seven kids who just finished kindergarten or first grade.  The team name they picked for themselves was fire bomb and that just about sums them up.  Our whole day is centered around giving purpose to literacy, in this case learning all about the sea so that we can make a museum exhibit (for a real museum that's opening downtown-way cool right?).  Reading and writing are intimately connected-in this case we read so that we can make art and write about what we learned for our exhibit. Needless to say I am learning a lot about the sea and I come home exhausted everyday.

Juan, in Elizabeth Barton de Tervino's I, Juan de Pareja, knows the relationship between reading to writing.  When his mistress is teaching him how to write he has this epiphany, "I learned from Mistress what sound each letter represented, and it came to me with a flash of joy that in learning to write I would also learn to read."  In my nerdy way I thought this would be a book about reading-but it's not.  It's a book about art which is just as good.

Juan is a slave who is sent to live with and work for the painter Velaquez.  In this process he learns about art, painting, life, friendship, and love.  Juan learns much from Velaquez, "he afforded his art the highest respect, that of never taking it for granted.  Always, as long as he lived, he tried to learn more, in order to do it better."  When one of the apprentices asked if art should be beauty Velaquez answered, "No, Cristobal.  Art should be truth; and truth unadorned, unsentimentalized is Beauty.  Art is Truth, and to serve art I will never deceive."

As I'm sure you realize by now when Velaquez teaches about art he is also teaching about life.  It is not always so philosophical-sometimes he uses humor.  When Juan cautions that Velaquez's rendering of the pope may be a little too stern Velaquez responds that he painted what he saw and, "we are all a bit fond of our faces, Juanico, no matter how they seem to others" so the pope would still like it.  This is another one  of those rare books where you don't just see the main character for one important experience you get to know then across their entire life.  And Juan had a truly fascinating life.

Never deceiving, liking your face...that's kids stuff.