Little Italian Man's Blog

One Man's Junk
is Another Man's Art

One my family members is in grade school. Last week her art teacher hosted scultpure day and the winning student, picked by the school administrators, got to submit their sculpture to a local arts fair. Her sculpture of an owl took first place:

As you can see, she’s got quite an eye for sculpture. Note how the warm color palate of the head contrasts with the more earthy forest green hue of the body. The arms and ears provide a playfully unbalanced symmetry while the torso takes on the exotic symbolism of a pineapple. She carved the feathermark pattern all by herself, by the way.

Oh, I almost forgot - the face looks like two testicles and a penis. Here it is from the side:

And here it is enhanced for dramatic effect:

The viewer will appreciate the shadowed edge, so as to draw one’s eyes to the center of the subject. Look deep enough into its jaundiced eye-‘balls’ and you’ll unlock the mysteries of the cosmos. Joking aside, I’m very proud of this particular member of my family. Wiener-faced sculpture not withstanding, she really does have an artistic eye, and by no means did she actually intend to sculpt male genitalia into the head of an owl. But it does strike me as odd how, not one single adult at her school, at any step in its genesis, tried to halt, or even slightly modify, the penis-and-testicles owl. They let her mold it, dry it, bake it in the kiln, glaze and cure it, then win the contest, without any revisions.

How could this be? My first thought was that the competition was slim, but further investigation revealed this not to be the case. Perhaps the white and tan clay was packaged in such a way that it could only be applied as spheres or sausages. But that seemed unlikely. This brought me to the only logical conclusion; they never saw a man’s genitalia at all – instead they saw Beeker from the Muppets with a noseful of coke, which, as everyone knows, is a guaranteed shoe-in at art competitions. Coke-nosed Beeker, junk-faced owl, whatever, the bottom line is she won and that’s all that matters in the end.