Class Today

After reading and discussing Frank O'Hara's "Why I Am Not a Painter" in class today, I immediately thought if my sister and me. I received no artistic genes whatsoever, whereas one of her majors is art. She is fabulous. (In 10th grade she was told to continue art, I was told I should...probably stop after that year..ouch.) Anyway, I love looking at her art because its almost foreign to me- I don't know how she did it, or where she got the idea, or how she knew what tools to use to create it. It makes me, literally, wish I was a painter/artist, etc. On the other hand, I'm the writer of the two. I'm not saying that she doesn't write or that shes not good at it...or even that I'm good at it, its just that she prefers art while Id rather write. She sometimes reads my writing (not necessarily my poems, more of the stuff from Techniques of Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction) and laughs at my sarcasm and wonders how I came up with some of the titles, phrases, etc that I use. We wonder about each others work, yet at the same time I do, in a sense, paint with words. Writing is a form of art, just not the traditional form people expect "art" to be. Art is also another form of writing- so much can be inferred or told just by looking at a piece of artwork. She tell stories through her artwork and it evokes certain feelings from people observing it, just as writing evokes feelings too. I enjoyed our class discussion of that piece.