Blue Period

Episode 4

“All art,” wrote Oscar Wilde in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, “is at once surface and symbol.” Certainly that fits with a novel about a man whose ill deeds and debaucheries are reflected in his portrait rather than on his body, but it's also a pretty good statement about the things Yatora is learning in this episode of Blue Period. Wilde's statement can be interpreted in several different ways, with one being that art is what you make of it – it can be nothing more than a pretty picture, or it can be a deeply symbolic image. Which it is depends fully on you, the consumer of the art. Even the artist loses their right to dictate what their work is once it's released into the world. But is that the theory that art cram school teaches?

Since anime is art, that's largely up to us to decide, and we've potentially got more of an idea than Yatora simply by virtue of being on the outside looking in. But to a degree, that's the position Yatora is in as well. He's something of an outsider in the art class world, a latecomer to the scene who is ignorant of the superstitions and general “knowledge” that those who have been pursuing art as a career for a longer amount of time are well versed in. Up to this point, Yatora's been taking everything at face value: if his art teacher tells him that he needs to go to art cram school to get into TUA, he takes that as truth. Because his image of artists painting in oils involves sitting with a palette at an easel, that's how he thinks art has to be created. While he knows intellectually that art is a creative field, the first time he truly understands that comes this week, when he attends a day class at his cram school and is surrounded by people who are much more immersed in the art world than he is. To see someone laying down tape on a canvas, making handprints, or cutting the canvas is mind-blowing for him, because he's been more or less viewing art as this formal process, maybe even a stuffy process. Even though making art is cathartic to Yatora, to a point it's also a proscribed process, more like following a pattern for a specific result than actual creativity.

That makes his decision to sit on the floor and angrily slash warm colors (he still typically works in understated or cool colors) across a blank canvas a major breakthrough. He was worried about creating what his peers called “exam art,” pieces deliberately designed to appeal to art school admissions, but the truth is that he had been basically making those kinds of paintings all along – technically fine but somewhat soulless. The painting he produces at the end of this episode is only the second he's done that comes from intense feelings, and it's better than his initial blue piece not only because he's got better technique now, but also because he's experienced something that forces him to scream on canvas. You don't have to suffer for art or to be an artist, but it does help to really feel.

It's Yotasuke who inadvertently drives this home for Yatora. Yotasuke's the kind of person who doesn't necessarily want to be instructed in his creative pursuits, making art school a frustrating experience for him, and he ultimately quits the cram school this week. That's hardly a condemnation of his future career – school can help, but not every artist needs to attend one to find success. But it does make him a very different person from most of the others Yatora interacts with. Yotasuke's not necessarily conceited about his skills, but he is frustrated with the responses of the cram school teachers. There's an implication that he feels it's their fault for not understanding what he's done, and viewing the student work at TUA's school festival/art show only seems to drive home his discontent with academic art. He's not wrong that all of the pieces have a similarity to them, a pretentiousness; a writer friend of my father's once commented that he can always tell when an author of literary fiction came out of an MFA program because they're all “edgy” and “special” in the exact same way, which is basically what Yotasuke and Yatora are seeing. But while Yatora can appreciate the silly little sculpture that stands out for its simplicity, Yotasuke simply condemns art academia as a whole. His leaving upsets Yatora, but interestingly enough it also becomes a catalyst for his own emotional work. After all, as Wilde said, “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.”

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Blue Period is currently streaming on Netflix.