Question:
Which of the following characters undergoes a change in the passage?
Real Art
“Grrrrr.”
Anthony looked across the table at Gabe. “Are you growling?”
Gabe kept his head down, staring at his paper. Maybe growling was a strange thing to do, but it best expressed how Gabe was feeling in art class that day.
Anthony didn’t understand Gabe’s frustration.
“I can’t make this,” Gabe said, poking his paper, “look like that!” He pointed stiffly at the props in the middle of the table and continued, “Instead of flowers and an old shoe, I just have a jumble of lines!”
Anthony craned his head around to see Gabe’s paper. He opened his mouth to respond, but Ms. Alvarez drifted over. “Now, Gabe,” she said, “don’t give up. Just make sure to start with your horizon line, add in a vertical element from the flowers, and then go from there.” She drifted away to another table.
Gabe stared at her back. “She probably thinks I’m just not trying,” he said, bitterly.
“Well,” Anthony said, “you’re growling in class. Of course you’re trying.”
Gabe shook his head. “No matter how hard I try, I can’t make my drawings look real, not like yours.”
Anthony had a real talent for art, and everyone knew it. Ms. Alvarez looked like she wanted to break into song every time he turned in an assignment.
“Haven’t you ever seen anything by that famous artist Picasso?” Anthony asked. Ms. Alvarez looked up from her desk, and Anthony lowered his voice. “His stuff is all twisted and strange,” he whispered. “It doesn’t look real at all, so I don’t think you have to be good at sketching to be a good artist.”
“I’m sure sketching helps, though,” Gabe said in a gloomy voice.
Anthony was quiet for a while as he shaded the side of a flower with a thick black pencil. Then he used crosshatching, a pattern made by drawing a series of crossed lines, to add texture to the old shoe. “Hey, Gabe,” he said finally, “remember that art camp I went to last summer? Want to know which class I was horrible at?”
Gabe stared at his friend. Anthony was never horrible at anything in art. “Ummm . . . quilting?”
Anthony snorted. “No, it was a class on cartooning, drawing comic strips. Comics kind of like this.” He reached a long arm over to Gabe’s binder and tugged out a scrap of paper.
Gabe glanced at the paper; it was something he’d doodled in math after finishing the problems on the board. The drawing was of a stick figure thinking about equations so hard he didn’t see that he was about to step off a cliff. As Gabe looked at his old sketch, the corner of his mouth quirked upwards into half a smile. When he had shown it to Anthony in math class, Anthony had laughed so hard that Mr. Holman had scolded them both. Of course, after Mr. Holman had seen the doodle, he had laughed too, even though he pretended to cough. Then Mr. Holman gave Anthony and him extra math problems to do.
“Those doodles are just for fun,” Gabe said. “They’re not real art.”
“Look, real art can be fun too,” Anthony insisted, “and it’s okay if your drawing of an old shoe doesn’t look like my drawing of an old shoe. Life would be boring if everyone made the same art.”
Gabe looked at his sketch and then at the doodle. He changed the curve of the vase in the sketch to make it irregular, more like one of his doodles. It did not look like the real vase, but Gabe decided it looked fine. He borrowed one of Anthony’s special pencils and settled down to work.
