HEART FOR THE ARTS

Covenant Christian Academy

Catherine Prescott

March 26, 2011

Good evening administrators, teachers, parents, artists, and friends of Covenant Christian Academy, …I’m so delighted to be here. Valerie McClymont is a dear friend and wonderful artist.  Valerie, thank you for asking me to come.  Covenant Christian Academy has a very fine and growing reputation in the community and, though I’ve never been a part of it, I have eyed it wistfully from afar; there was not such an option for our family.

It’s an honor to be among so many like-minded Christians…like-minded for one reason.  I am an artist, so I will speak strongly on behalf of the arts; I am an art teacher, so I will speak passionately for art education; but the driving force behind what I have to say tonight, and the reason we are like-minded, is this: I am a parent and I, too, want the very best for my children.

I have some stories to tell you.  I’ll start with a tough one.  When my daughter was a senior at Red Land H.S. I was invited to a student poetry reading.  A grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts had brought in a Poet-in-Residence who worked with the kids for perhaps two weeks, teaching them to write and preparing them to read their own poem to an audience.  It was the middle of the day, and a sparse group of mostly women, scattered throughout the auditorium, sat silently waiting for the event to begin.  Turning to the woman next to me I asked, “Do you have a son or daughter reading a poem here today?”  She said.  “Well, yes, but she’s no poet.”  I’m not sure I said anything back…perhaps my expression prompted her next statement, “She’s the athletic type.  She’s big.  She’s not built like a poet.  She can’t write poetry.”  I couldn’t help it; I said, “Well, I guess she can, though, because she’s about to come out on the stage and read a poem she herself wrote.”  The mother eyed me coolly and the conversation ended.  The students filed in and sat on chairs…there were only 10 or 12, clearly hand-picked from a larger group.  I looked for a “big” girl and yes, one was taller and sturdier than some others, but not the vision I had in my head from her mother’s description.   The mother poked me when she stood up to read and said, “That’s her.”  It was a really nice poem; no comment next door.

Now, all of us are cringing here; none of us want our children to be pigeon-holed like that, let alone by us, but we have to admit that our hopes, our fears and, oh mercy, our assumptions, are spilling out all over our kids all the time! From what we read it is apparent that, in God’s mind, it is never too late to change, so we have good reason to look closely at assumptions, even our own, that might keep our children from having the very best.

Here’s another story.  I was at a medical facility last week.  One of the people who attended to me said brightly, “I see from your paper work that you are a portrait artist!”  I smiled, hoping that a non-verbal response might stop her from saying what I feared…what in fact most people have said to me over the last 40 years when they find out I’m a portrait painter, “You know, I admire that, I really admire it, because that is something I could never do.”  And, like many people, she went on to say, “See, drawing, that is something I have absolutely no talent for.” I pushed back, lightly, at the many assumptions in those two statements.  Her argument escalated: her daughter had been doing noteworthy work in art class, and the family had received word from her teacher suggesting that the girl’s ability might warrant some art classes outside of school. Her mother was incredulous, not only because she hadn’t noticed anything special going on in her child’s art, but because her child was athletic ;  “so,” she went on, “it never occurred to us that there would be this OTHER SIDE!” 

Now I’m starting to itch all over and push back a little harder.  The gist of my questions went like this: Why do you think that you can’t do it, and why does the thought that you can’t do it elevate it… so that special admiration is reserved for those who can?  Why do you think it is merely a matter of talent, and why do you think it is hard… no, impossible…to learn, that is, to be taught to draw.  She was undaunted.  “Well, that’s just what I’ve always believed.”  Me: “Where did this belief come from?”   She: “I don’t know, I’ve just always thought that.”  We were smiling, but now I asked her, seriously, “What would it take for me to dispel that belief?  Would I have to wrestle you to the ground and sit on you to get you to change your mind?”  At this point the doctor came in - so I finished my thought in my head, “Would I have to sit on you, to get you to hear this: I could teach you to draw in less time than it took to become a nurse, and at no greater cost than it takes to learn to score a goal by kicking a ball.”  Talent, yes, talent is helpful, and it may, for some, be the starting point, but talent is the easy part because it’s the part that was given to you.  It’s time, so much time, practice, study, determination, money spent, commitment:  in two words, your values and your character, that are the determining factors for excellence.   Would anybody say, “Oh, that Zidane.  He’s so talented it makes me sick!”?   Can any of us really guess how hard he works, how much he practices, or how in the world he learned to concentrate like that?  And would anybody say that soccer is not worth studying because, well, “my son’s not talented and he could never be Zidane.”?  Is that why parents are out there, clutching hot paper cups of coffee on a wet Saturday morning, watching their little guys run like the wind - the wrong direction - and loving it?

Easy for me to say that art is the same as soccer.  I’m an art teacher.  I have no job unless I can convince people that it’s 1. teachable, and  2. valuable.  In fact, part of my job at Messiah College for the first 15 years that I taught there, was to instruct students who were required to take a hands-on course in either music, theater, or art.  Wow, those music and theater classes filled up really fast.  I had 60 students a semester (3 classes of drawing) who ranged from your back-row, hostile slumper, to the terrified “I-know-I-will-fail-this-class,” seniors.  My premise was the same as the 19^th C. drawing teacher, John Gadspy Chapman: “Anybody that can learn to write can learn to draw.”  I discovered, teaching these classes, four other things that art, and the study of art, develops:  Curiosity, Discipline, Identification, and History.

We are born curious. Newborns, day-old infants, when given face time, will try everything they see you doing. They apparently want to know how it’s done.  They are curious about how you stick out your tongue, so they experiment until they can imitate it.  You can see them concentrating.  They lean into the task, they watch intensely, and out comes that tiny tongue.

It requires a certain amount of humility to be curious.   Arthur Rubenstein said, “Curiosity is a willing, a proud, an eager confession of …ignorance.”  It’s hard to know God if you’re not curious.  And curiosity is not only of His making, but it exists so that we can know Him.  Romans 1: 19 and 20, make it clear that knowledge of God through observation of His world comes by asking why, when, how, and by whom, and that there is no excuse for not doing so.  Every teacher dreads a class full of know-it-alls.  Albert Einstein wrote, “The important thing is not to stop questioning.  Curiosity has its own reason for existing.  One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality.”  Drawing is nothing if not that.  Drawing makes you see.  There is no better and more thorough way to see what is there, in reality, in the creation, than having to record it, bit by bit, bird by bird. It is an act of curiosity to draw from observation.  The continual thought in your head is, “Huh?  What am I seeing??  No student, no artist, who has drawn for two hours from observation can say, “I already knew that.”

Wonderfully, Curiosity takes us somewhere.  It is the start of choosing what to commit ourselves to.  It leads to Discipline.  There are quite a few meanings for this word, and they all have very different emotional associations. I’m interested here in the kind of discipline associated with hard work.  Do you remember the first time you understood that work, or the pursuit of something that required discipline, became desirable to you, when you realized that it would take you into unknown territory that you weren’t sure you were capable of but you just had to do it? And, when you pulled it off, there was no need for anyone else to high-five you. As with curiosity you had to lean into the requirements:  enormous concentration, determination, and the expectant hope that you can and will do it.

When my daughter was 10 or 11, she told me she would like to do a painting.  We had given her a little set of acrylic paints and brushes for her birthday and some canvases like you see here in the auction.  I asked her what she would like to paint and she chose her favorite stuffed toy, a monkey dressed in a yellow shirt and red trousers.  I told her that none of the colors were just right as they came from the little tubes, but would have to have to be mixed, and showed her the process of taking little dabs and adding them to others.  I told her to take her time, to really look and paint only what she saw.  And I told her to begin by just slowly drawing him.  She sat him in a chair and went to work.  I have no idea how long it took, but I remember thinking that her attention span was unusually stretched out.  I was confirmed in my belief that instruction in drawing and painting consists of 3 basic things: 1. Take your time, give no thought to the enormity of the task and how long it might take;  2. Look, really look, don’t let your hand get in front of your eye; and 3. Be patient, give no thought to the final results but instead devote yourself to getting it right as you go.  That’s essentially all I had told her.  When she finished she set her brushes down, reached out and put her hands on Monkey’s torso; letting out a long “Wheeeeew,” she laid him down.  He, not she, was tired.

Observation, studying things out of curiosity and the discipline of figuring out how they work, quite naturally leads to identification.  The idea that knowing, and identifying, are so connected is a beautiful one to me, because I desire so intensely to learn, and in order to do it, as I draw and paint, I have to identify.  Possibly the most exciting part about working at drawing is the fact that you have to name everything you draw by a new name, a name that no one else calls it by.  You have to identify it from your own, exclusive point of view in order to draw it accurately.  If you let, for 1 second, someone else’s word for it creep into your mind you can’t see it enough to translate it to the page in front of you.  If you call it a nose you can’t draw it because a nose can’t become a mark.  You can only draw a line or a shape or a color or a darker, or a lighter part.  You can only draw what is relative to other things that are also unnamable.  You have to call it a curve, just this far from this small dot, with a darker part here, and a small amorphous shape there.  If you are trying to mix a certain green, and the word “olive green” creeps into your head, it is no help at all.  You can only mix the right color by adding a little of this and a little of that and seeing what it looks like.  I think anyone who is curious, and working at figuring out anything, has to do this.  People who are after something have to see it or get it or learn it for themselves.  They have to shut out descriptions that have gone before in order to make the discovery their own.  “Aha” is intensely private, and remains remote until that moment it is yours.  And the path is a path of discernment, of making distinctions, of sorting…this but not that…this but not that…in order to get it right.  This is ultimately one of the great joys of living, and it can happen in any pursuit, anywhere, anytime.  You don’t have to be in a classroom.  But you have to be curious, and disciplined, and humble.

So where do we get our inspiration, our models, our examples?  Where do we find the results of the curious, the disciplined, and those who identify.   And where can we see the connections between things we are studying, and things others have learned, so we can have the hope of putting it all together?   The future doesn’t have that; we have to look back, we have to look at history, and museums are one place to literally see it.  Standing in a museum, surrounded by artifacts, placing yourself in the context of history just by looking, opens you to the humility of being very small.  You’re best response is a kind of “Wow, I didn’t know!” and very often pre-verbal, like a little boy at an aquarium who stood shaking as a huge fish swam by him and when my friend, his babysitter asked “what is the fish doing?” he shouted, “He…he’s…he’s fippin his fips!!!!”  Here was a child falling into wonder and awe.  I’ve had students be apologetic for getting “philosophical,” (their word) as though they were ashamed of how deeply they were moved by being opened to another world.   My husband, an artist who, as an unbeliever, considered the past to have no part in his life, was converted to Christianity at age 26.  He went for the first time to Italy because we were studying at L’Abri, and when he came into the Scrovegni chapel in Padua, whose walls are covered with Giotto’s early 14^th C. frescoes of The Life of Christ, he flooded with tears as he stood looking at the story that he was, at last, connected to.  It was a visual history that in the space of an hour unlocked, in a way no reading or preaching or prayer could, the isolation of not knowing Christ.

But it doesn’t have to be art.  Museums are essentially houses for artifacts:  human heads the size of your fist, tail bones as big as your head, gold coins, sarcophagi, columns, dishes, spears, piles of suitcases, rockets, fetuses in bottles, bonnets, fireplaces, trains; all of these things sound like non-art, but paintings and sculpture in museums are also artifacts. Here’s a hint about looking at the kind of art that perhaps makes you feel ignorant, art that seems like it shouldn’t be there because it doesn’t look great.  Do you ask the same of a scapula in a case?  Try letting it be something you learn about in terms of how it fits into history, why it is significant because of what came before and what comes after.  And it won’t take any more studying to find that out than it did to identify the meaning of the scapula. (Often the wall text or the portable recorded lecture will tell you). One of the dearest things ever said to me at the end of a semester came from one of those initially closed, hostile students who had to take art from me.  He said, “Mrs. Prescott.  I want you to know that I will never be an artist, and I may not even love art, but this I know:  I will take the children I hope to have some day to art museums, and I will learn with them. “

Perhaps you have noticed that the word creativity is missing from my brief discussion of some things you can learn from studying and making art.  I want to address the assumption that “artist = creative” and “accountant = uncreative.”  If you are made in the image of God, which God says you are, if you are a human, then you are creative.  God identifies Himself as a creator, The Creator.  Your inheritance of being creative is not a question, but perhaps it needs to de-mystified.  Many students have said to me that they are not creative…or even, “I’m not the creative type.”  I’m not sure which is sadder, but that first one is just plain untrue.  It’s who we are, not a choice we make, and He promises that as his creative child you will delight Him every bit as much as your children, in their creativity, delight you.  It’s in your nature and theirs.  And just by being you, by doing what you are able, you serve and worship Him like a cat chasing its tail or a flower waving in the wind. “Even the rocks will cry out.” 

One last thing: commentator David Brooks has written a book called The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement.  It’s a study of the new sciences of human nature, and though I haven’t yet read the book, I devoured his New Yorker article, “The Social Animal”, that preceded the publication of the book.  In it he describes the effect a teacher has on a student’s ability to study, to discover, and to love learning. Brooks says, about his fictional historian, Ms. Taylor, that “she stressed the importance of collecting conflicting bits of information before making up one’s mind, … of enduring uncertainty for long stretches as an answer became clear, of correcting for one’s biases.”  She sometimes said, “Sorry, I jump to conclusions too quickly,” or, in other ways made clear her limited grasp on conclusive knowledge.  In this way she “communicated the distinction between mental strength (the processing power of the brain,) and mental character (the mental virtues that lead to practical wisdom).”   And I’m gong to add that she probably never said, “I can’t draw.”  This suggests to me that humility is a major ingredient in teaching a child to be curious, to choose discipline, to learn to identify, and to look to history.  I believe this is the process of good education, and that art, rather than being special, or “the other side”, is, like everything else, and for the same reasons, a teachable and valuable pursuit.

[Learn more about the author here: Catherine Prescott.]