I did my best to suppress my usual rebellious feelings — fears of being corrupted by narrow-minded authorities; more fundamental fears of being forced to recognize that the level and range of my talents are rather more average than my parents hoped and imagined. I did my best to try to learn what this more experienced, more dexterous and more visually oriented person had to teach. I thought, or fantasized, that, mellowed by age, I might be able to keep this instructor’s instruction at arm’s length, understanding that his insights into light values and how to render them were one piece of the much larger mass of learning in which I would have to become entangled if I was going to learn to draw. (Or should I say, to draw better?)

The day before I went to this class I had been thinking about Americans’ sense of taste. In particular, not for the first time I noted to myself that most of my fellow citizens think that water has or should have no taste; all “normal” water tastes the same. (Abnormal water being polluted, brackish or muddy.) Among other things, this view means that if the tap water we get to drink has any character it is only by accident. (I suspect that by “character” I above all mean sweetness.) And it would seem that not only do our bottled-water purveyors respond to this ideal of flavorlessness, they find it useful. It allows them to use advertising to attach attributes to their waters without risking having these advertised attributes clash with actual ones. And the flavorlessness of the base product leaves room for other existing or new products — flavored and/or sweetened water. The paradigm is not limited to water, but applies to most American food products.

          What is the content of an artificially flavored life, or of a life in which one has limited awareness of the different flavors — or of the forms, colors, essences, forces — with which one comes into contact? Can such a person be said to be experiencing life? Is experiencing life desirable?

          Such thoughts had led me to think that it would be good to ask children to describe the flavor of different water samples. This led to thinking about the “progressive” American approach to teaching art to young children — the approach in vogue when I was a child. Per Rousseau the essential was to avoid stifling children’s natural creativity — encourage them to express themselves as “freely” as possible. And thus a child who liked being complimented on his or her artworks might come to use bright colors, big strokes. Pessimism, shades of gray were frowned upon, as was the minute or technical. Even today in my son’s elementary school, I thought to myself, young children were regularly being asked to draw objects — houses and trees, for example — but were young children ever asked, say, to look at a house while drawing one?

          Do we continue to overlook the extent to which constraints (e.g., the traditional architecture of a still life or sonnet) may lead to discovery by forcing us to depart from our customary ways of seeing objects or putting words together? And art-making is not only about making things, but also a way to see better the putative objects and beings of our worlds. It can be part of a struggle to find essences, get beyond superficial understandings.