This issue of The Eagle is “The IB Art Issue.”

Full disclosure: My knowledge of art, sadly, is limited. I don’t even remember an art department when I was in high school; I am sure one existed somewhere, perhaps down the hall from shop class or home economics. My parents exposed me to art by getting me a “paint by the numbers” set for Christmas. Remember those kits? You got this box and inside were several “canvases” on pieces of stiff cardboard with the outline of a landscape in light blue, and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of small numbers. It was such a confused mass of numbers that the picture itself was scarcely discernible unless you narrowed your eyes and squinted at it a bit, letting the canvas  slide in and out of focus. Inside the box, tiny little glass jars, each with a number, and a metal screw cap, were full of paints. All one had to do was use the brush to daub a No. 6 paint on all the areas designated with the number 6, and so on, and in time, if you painted within the lines carefully, a masterpiece emerged. I painted a number of such masterpieces, all of which my mom framed and hung on the bathroom walls—none of them, as I recall, ever made it to a wall in the living room.

My appreciation of art has matured since then, of course—enough to know, for example, that all Picasso’s women in his Cubist phase have faces like 12-string guitars.

My ignorance notwithstanding, I suspect that real art is more than simply learning the craft of applying paint to canvas or coaxing a figure out of a block of marble. It’s controversial, and perhaps even subversive, often challenging conventional visions of reality or perceived flaws in the cultural or corporate moral consciousness. Art can make people red-faced angry or embarrassed. Cigars have been painted-out in portraits of famous theologians, and fig leaves often have been added to cover genitalia, and protests have been lodged when art is derided as “so-called art” because it offends the sensibilities—think of Robert Mapplethorpe or Andres Serrano, for example.

Perhaps it is all of these things—controversial, subversive, challenging—because good art causes the observer to think, to enter into a conversation with the artist.

This, it seems to me, is what one of our own art teachers here at SAS, Jason Maddock, is getting at in his own art. Maddock has a solo exhibition in just a couple of days (”Interlopers,” Being Gallery, Room 107/Bldg. 3, No. 50 Moganshan Lu, Sunday, April 25, 3pm ) and he explains how and why he’s taken art outdoors, creating what he calls “a visual conversation with people on the streets.” He’ll take a portrait or drawing and set it up on a busy sidewalk where, he says, “it transforms that moment, that place, and all of the people involved into a strange performance where art and real life connect.”

So art is subversive. Perhaps. Controversial. Perhaps. But in any case, good art evokes conversation, and objets d’art may be pieces which simply affirm life by helping the observer to see its beauty in simple ways hitherto unnoticed. Thus the charm of a still life or a pastoral scene. Here the work of art reminds us of the essential wonder and mystery of life and somehow takes that which is ordinary and transforms it into something extraordinary. In other words, it “sacramentalizes the mundane,” according to Teilhard de Chardin in his little work The Divine Milieu. It’s art that takes the mundane and profane and creates a sacred space, full of mystery and wonder. This kind of art causes us to stop dead still, in slack-jawed amazement at the beauty of life that the artist has uncovered.

This, at least, was my reaction as I wandered through the IB Art Show this past week on both campuses. It was like, shock and awe: “Wow, wow, and triple wow!” I was impressed with the talent and creativity on display at the Performing Arts Center (Puxi campus) and the Pool Atrium (First and Second Floors—Pudong campus). Here was a body of work that represented two years of labor for these students—journal writing, notes, sketches and work. The result is magnificent.

And behind these young artists is the steady influence of our own artists-in-residence, our teachers in all the divisions, who are guiding our students to move past or beyond boundaries of conventional expression to understand metaphor and image, and to take us all into a conversation about the world we live in and the nature of life.

If you were able to see the shows, you know that our students did this exceedingly well. A small sample of their work can be found in this issue on pages 10-17. Enjoy.
—Timothy Merrill, Editor, The Eagle