Writing as Art in The Painted Bird Three works cited The use of art has many functions. It lacks a satisfactory definition and is easier to describe as a way in which something is made - "the use of skill and imagination in creating aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others" - rather than as IS. Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird depicts the disasters that befall a six-year-old boy who is separated from his parents and wanders across the primitive Polish-Soviet borders during the war. Kosinski does not mention the boy's name and the names of the cities he travels to in the text. This allows the reader to assume that this child could have been an unfortunate young man during the war. Kosinski's writings organize the chaos of the boy's life experiences through form. The use of both organic and conventional form throughout the book brings the reader closer to the horrific encounters the boy faced on a daily basis. Using writing as an artistic method organizes the chaos of experience through form. Kosinski's novel applies the organic form to portray the terrible predicaments the boy encountered during separation from his family. The use of organic form in the formal outline gives the reader the scenario of “what will be next” before proceeding through the pages. Kosinski gives the reader a glimpse of the animalistic characteristics of the city's inhabitants that the boy faces during the war. This allows the reader not to be “shocked” when the peasants the boy confronts have demonstrated an extraordinary predilection for incest, sodomy, and petty violence. While reading “The Painted Bird,” the reader gets the impression that religion seemed to be a top priority. for the people of the village. However, Kosinski's use of conventional forms to inform his readers that the church was a very important part of the culture in these villages seemed to contradict this portrayal. In the book's climactic episode, the boy drops a missal while helping celebrate mass and is thrown by angry parishioners into a pot of manure. Coming out of the pit he realizes that he has lost the ability to speak. Church stood by and watched as the boy was thrown into the muck and no one tried to help him. A group of bullies pushes the boy, a supposed spy or Jew, under the ice of a frozen pond.