#@theartassignment

A 'let's play' on The Art assignment? DAISY is bending reality!

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These are the books closest to my bed. Some, I've read before - other I have been meaning to read.

Dear Mr. Green, My name is Di Law and I am a senior at The Lovett School. Let me start by saying your books have changed my life. Not only have they changed my life, but they have changed my boyfriend, Griffin Baumberger's, life. In November of our freshman year my future boyfriend went home sick with a fever and a stomach ache. He wouldn't return to school for two years. He had a minor stomach bug which chained into a series of infections, shutting his immune system down. Everytime one virus would be cured, another one would pop up, uncontrollably. This went on for a year and the doctors coukdn't determine why. At the beginning of our sophomore year they had seemed to cure all of the viruses, but the pain he had been suffering remained. Stomach pains and migraines consumed his life making it impossible for him to go to school. All his vitals seemed to be healthy but the pain remained the same. It was unexplainable and uncontrollable and the most traumatizing time of his life. His body has become so used to being in pain, that that became the norm for him and it was almost impossible to train his body to be healthy again. During this time he read all of your books, some multiple times. The main novel that helped him cope was The Fault in Our Stars. His mother was extremely concerned that he had been reading a book about a kid dying from cancer while he was in this state of illness, but he read anyways. He was able to relate to the characters and find happiness in the darkest of his times. At the beginning of our junior year he was able to come back to school and attempt at being "normal" again. This is when I really got to know him. In October we began dating and he suggested TFIOS to me. I read it and immediately fell in love with the book and at the same time I fell in love with him. I fell in love with him like the way you fall asleep, slowly, then all at once. Your book brought us together and helped me see him in a way I never had before. Now I am writing you a year later to thank you and to ask you of once last favor. In the spring we will be starting our senior projects. I have been following "Art Assignment" religiously and am in love with the concept and idea of the project. For our senior project we want to portray the idea of "The Perception of Beauty in our World." We have created our own Art Assignment for ourselves. The Assignment consists of 3 stages, 1. Define beauty, 2. Make Beauty, and 3. Redefine beauty. We will first ask people of many stages of life and careers what their definition of beauty is, what makes something beautiful and what is beautiful in their world. We will also ask them the same things about things that are ugly. We will then take some of the beautiful things, (for example: food, wealth, physical appearance, clothes, nice cars, family, ect.) and find the corruption in these things (for example: how food is really made, gambling and money ruining people's lives, eating disorders, excessive need for material things, pollution from nice cars, and divorce). We will then do the same thing for the ugly things (for example: pollution, poverty, hate crimes, racism, over population, global warming, old age) and find the beauty in them (for example: snow in naturally warm places, charity and happy in homelessness, gay pride and race pride as well as humans loving different humans, beauty in wrinkles, beauty in overweight people, people with cancer who are happy and making a difference) The goal of our Art Assignment is to show that not all things that we see as beautiful and making us happy are necessarily good and not all things we see as ugly or corrupt are really ugly at all. The goal is to find the good in the bad, which is something Griffin was able to do in the two years he spent out of school, thanks to your books. We would love the opportunity to talk on Art Assignment about these things we find and we would love the opportunity to talk with you about our assignment in general and thank you for sharing your stories with us and changing our lives.