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This is an extra scene of what I imagined happened in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road...

Before, they lived with two men and one woman with a child. They took shifts watching for the roadrats. Rumors passed around about people who left the town at night for food or water. Some heard their screams, others heard the chopping. He held her close every night. He could feel the child kicking her skin. Translucent and full, like the moon they would never see again.

The men proposed to move to the next town. They left in the day a week later. The two men held the weapons in the front of the group. The first night was cold. He fell asleep with his pistol beside him and the child between her and him.

He awoke to leaves rustling a few yards away. The two men stood by the woman whose mouth was stuffed with a dirty rag. Her child was limp in between her spread legs. One man leaned down to whisper to her and the other unzipped his pants. She began to sob. He fired once and then twice. Two florid splotches appeared on their heads as they fell.

He untied her hands and feet while her limbs shook. The brains of the child were spread on the ground.

They told me they were going to cook my baby.

He didn’t notice the knife until her hand flashed towards her heart. The color of her face drained onto her clothes. They left the bodies and walked back to town.

For my piece, I chose the quote that stuck with me after I had finished the book. I really like this quote because it really has some connection to the book’s essential questions. The quote is found on page 10 when the boy and the man pass some dead bodies. The boy doesn’t seem to be fazed when he sees the bodies but the man comments on how things stick in your head and the boy points out that the man forgets things. The man replies with “Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.” I thought that this was an interesting quote because it seems as if it had been told to the man by someone else before and I wanted to write about the situation that he would have been in.

I chose to write about cannibalism and morals because that was a huge part of staying the good guys for the boy. Every time they saw evidence of cannibalism, the boy would ask the man if they were going to stay the good guys. The man must have had an experience where he decided that he would never be a cannibal but early enough that the boy wouldn’t have remembered it. If the boy would have remembered a time where they were close to becoming the bad guys, I don’t think that he would have been as innocent as he was portrayed in the book. Some of the essential questions that I thought about in my brainstorm were, “Where do morals come from?” and “Who or what do you live for if there is nothing left?” These fit into my piece because this would be one of the moments that probably would have shaped the man’s morals and then in time, the boy’s morals. The woman in the piece (not the mother of the boy), kills herself in the end because her son is dead. This shows that she was only surviving and living because of her son.

The work that I did was based off many others. I thought that maybe I could reflect like a mirror image of what people do daily. What it means to be an artist to me is showing how you feel on a simple piece of paper. I used many different tecniques to make my work the way it is. All of my work was inspiration, I felt like I had to make the things I did, take a picture. I drew what I saw and I thought was worthy and was very different something no one would have though of doing. I was inspired by many but only I knew what I wanted to do.

Art 2, the second class of art offered at Science Leadership Academy is all about the deeper exploration of the different types of visual arts. This quarter, we started off the by getting an overview of all the pieces we were doing and all the options we had for each piece. For each piece there were three options for the workload that you wanted. They were Passive, for the student who was in the class just because, Middle for students who are interested in art but not sure if they want to pursue futures in art, and the Future Art Student which is pretty self explanatory.

Our first assignment of quarter was another Art History assignment. We were to research art from any country that we wanted on the list of the website we were assigned to. I chose France and a dress by Yves Saint Laurent. The dress is his timeless Mondrian dress.

The second assignment is the one I am most proud of this quarter. It is an artistic collage inspired by Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam”, as you can see the resemblance from the hands reaching out towards the diamond ring. I gave it a modern twist by adding the diamond and model cutouts form a Cosmopolitan issue. Dubbed “Girls love diamonds.” this piece is definitely the work that cherish most out of my compilation this quarter.

The third was a challenging one. Our job was to draw fabric. I chose to do something differently and draw draped robes on a made-up/fantasy character I created myself as well. I thought this was challenging because of the fact that I had to pay close attention to where the fabric was hanging and going on the model. Although it was difficult, I was still able to create good looking fabric and do it in a more creative way than just drawing the fabric alone.

The next assignment took us away from the pencil and paper and made us go digital. We were tasked with shooting a photo and professionally editing it. I did this plenty of times before and still do it even now so this was right up my alley. I shot a symmetrical photo of a mailbox which was shot using the rule of thirds. The mailbox was centered with beautiful flowers behind it which gave it the bright colors. While editing, I made sure to boost the vibrancy of the colors in order to make them pop.

The last assignment was an illustration of a children’s book, poem, novel. Being the person that I am, I chose to do an illustration of lyrics from rap songs. The songs were by Travis Scott and Kanye West, which explain my drawings which show Travis Scott and Kanye West performing actions that they speak about in their songs.

The taste of sulfur still lingering in the air, the man coughed. Felt the debris cut pieces from his throat and coughed up more blood onto the frozen ground. He looked up into the gray and the dark of the sky and shouted to god;

Have you no mercy!?... Have you no shame!?

His breath riding on the wind, the cold air making silhouettes of the shadows of what full trees once looked like. It reminded him of how hope took false forms, how it was a bargaining chip from god to the damned, and all he could do was sit. Trying to extract the pieces of the mirage from his mind.

What do you want from me!? What do you want from us!? Why am I still here!!!

The ringing silence that bounced off the wind taunted him, the apples fallen and rotting at his feet.

He thought of the rain, he thought of the simmering ground how it was always cold and thawing but never completely unfrozen. What an irony in a world of fire, He thought of floods, and noah, and world's end, he thought of water, and the life that is given with a boat. How long would it sit frozen? The rust eating away at the pipes. You cannot clean the world of soot, or ash, or singed leaves that have long fallen and been dead. Hell was right here.

Isn’t it?

In the rotting of dead men, with teeth like splinters, everything, burned.

The reason I chose this section on page 119 right before the man goes into the house and chews the hay seeds, is because I honestly felt as though something was missing. That we missed something between those two moments That break in a paragraph has the ability to further create a dialog of what it means to be forsaken. Especially in a world like this. It raises the question of; Can truly even be a good guy? Apples are always a significant tool used in literature. Authors make choices when they write, and McCarthy being the poetic writer that he is I believe chose apples rotten apples and a burned apple orchard or I interpreted it at least, as addressing the idea of the world's end and being forsaken, because prior to this scene in the apple orchard we hear talk of serpents and other biblical references. Therefore I tied back that piece of genesis with Adam and Eve to the end of the world, how she had forsaken mankind and now the time has now ended completely. That hell is the very world you live in. I chose this theme in particular because the Man’s conversations with god many times turn to arguments, vast exchanges of silence and anger and shouting between the man and the sky, and then there is this other piece of god that the man has which is through the boy, and what it means to have faith. It is as if the boy is his god, because the boy is what he believes in. The boy in many ways which are more innocent is this all knowing being, who often times brings the hope back to the man, and keeps the man going. The boy is the man’s god because the man has unwavering faith in the boy, as one does in god, the boy has to live, the boy has to keep moving, the boy drives the man’s will to live, the mans faith in his entirety. The only way the man still feels anguish in a world this doused in pain is because of his love and obligation to protect the boy whom he has deemed sacrosanct.