When I was a student in my college painting class, my professor gave the class an unusual assignment: it was called “the extraordinary painting.”

The professor did not go into detail about what was expected. Each student was free to decide what the word “extraordinary” meant.

My mind churned with possibilities. Some slumbering part of me was suddenly fully alert and interested. But meanwhile I wondered: Why was the extraordinary painting not every assignment? When people began painting, did they usually think “I am going to do this painting, but I am only going to make it okay”?

Maybe. In college, painting is done to earn a grade. There is almost always an external reward, which sometimes erodes the ambition to do a great painting for the sake of it being great. “I have to pass,” students think, “so that I hurry and graduate and get a job.”

But I wondered if there are other reasons why someone might not attempt doing something extraordinary. I had this thought because of how the assignment shifted my thinking. It was not that I was not trying to do my best in art. I always tried to make an “A” if I could.

But from the moment I heard the words “extraordinary painting,” my mind latched onto them. Who cared about an “A”? I had a more exciting challenge.

Permission had been given. No one was going to accuse me of thinking too much of myself for trying to do something awesome. From then on, I felt like some unknown inhibiting factor had been dislodged. The words swept me from the mundane and into the stratosphere. My imagination flickered. I was inspired.

Despite that, I was certainly not the best art student in the department. I had far more aptitude in writing and my teachers were always telling me so.

In studio classes professors raved over my concepts but lamented my technical execution. Considering how much they chastised me, it is remarkable that I never made less than a “B” in my art classes.

But the assignment had not been given only to the “A” art students. My professor did not say, “Okay, for my best students, your final exam will be the extraordinary painting. The rest of you can paint a still life of cabbage. And never mind about trying to make it great. Or even good. I just want you to satisfy the bottom rung conditions of the assignment.”

Rather, the assumption was that any art student could aim high and produce something awesome if they really tried. Some students interpreted the assignment to mean something physically imposing, so they went big with a nearly wall-sized canvas.

I took a different approach. For me “extraordinary” meant thinking beyond my limited time-bound existence.

Also, at that time I was going through a sort of “hippy” phase. In the early nineties the environmental movement was in full swing. I went to the grocery store and bought three packs of styrofoam cups, small, medium, and large. Then I scanned books for images of Martian landscapes, angry rust-red and rock-strewn deserts that somehow managed to look as airless as they actually were.

I bought a giant tube of red acrylic paint and transformed the rectangular canvas into a forbidding and brooding Martian landscape. Then I cut the styrofoam cups in half vertically and glued the haves into the painting, three at the bottom, two above those, and one at the top, so that together they resembled a pyramid structure; finally, I added a finishing touch: the words, rendered in titanium white, The Last Artifact.

Despite my best efforts, my painting craftsmanship was not stellar; I was more proficient with oils than the acrylics the assignment required. Still, my rendering was good enough to get my point across; the lurid atmosphere looked beautifully nightmarish, and the styrofoam cups looked like an alien structure, mysterious, lonely, and eternal.

The critique went well for me, although more was made over my title than the painting itself, seeming to confirm to everyone that I was more of a writer than a visual artist. Incidentally, everyone was in agreement that even in visual art, words were powerful. Whether my painting succeeded in being extraordinary is debatable, but there was something liberating about thinking “big” and doing my best.

In any case, I got an “A” for the painting.

I wish I could remember more about what the other students created. On critique days I hardly noticed anything around me until the hour of judgement was all over.

But the assignment continued to make me wonder: Why would anyone not try to do something extraordinary if they were capable of it? Why does excellence seem to have a lid that had to be removed by a teacher saying, it is okay to do your best?

It there a drive toward mediocrity? I remember a time in junior high school where that was the case with me. Having been bullied the year before, I was self-conscious and afraid to call attention to myself. Creative efforts seemed dangerous because they felt personal. I tried to do everything the way everyone else did, even when it came to my writing, which I loved. Fortunately, I exited that phase a couple of years later.

But how many people entered that phase and never left it? After all, attempting excellence is risky because failure is possible, and ridicule sometimes follows.

The higher the aspirations, the more likely failure is, so attempting anything extraordinary has to mean allowing – and even embracing – mistakes in order to learn from them.

But my art assignment was called an “extraordinary painting,” not a “perfect painting”; the second condition would have more likely produced paralysis than extraordinariness.

I wonder what would happen if the fear of being ridiculed for creative aspirations disappeared altogether. What could be accomplished if failure was not considered a disaster? What if creative efforts were not mocked any more than watching television or surfing the internet?

Maybe everyone would start doing extraordinary things and the new bar to aspire to would be extra-extraordinary. I am fairly certain my painting was not that, but I cannot go back to look at it.

I no longer have my “extraordinary” painting. When I moved from South Carolina to Florida, the styrofoam cups were torn and broken. Only a slide of it remains. Ironically, I ended up throwing the painting away. But I did feel guilty afterward. Who knows how many hundreds of years those styrofoam cups will last?

In any case, the assignment contained an important lesson, the permission to escape what was practical and expected in order to produce something truly original.

Whether it is a story or a painting, the best art begins with thinking, “That would be awesome.” For me there is a quickening of the pulse, a stirring of imagination, and an upsurge of adrenalin.

Each new concept seems like the most important idea I have ever had and when I am done, I feel changed.

That reward is the best feeling there is.