In some previous posts, I’ve highlighted the portrait work begun this summer for a community space, an after school refuge for kids. On a recent Saturday, a group of us gathered for several hours to paint in a basic background to set the avatars into a landscape. This entire tableau is going to be a storied timeline, further to be detailed and linked. Do I sound like I know what I’m doing? I laugh at the thought and my own chutzpah. I’ve never tackled something this big! But the stars aligned this year for the project. The ideas clicked, the grant money provided, the kids showed enthusiasm, and the time came available soon after I was asked to consider spearheading the venture. It’s going to come to a unified completion with a little help from friends. It’s way better together. Our goal is to have these two long hallway walls completed with all the elements by Christmas.
Category Archives: learning as I teach
on the vacancy of meaningless-ness
“I knew nihilism, and my friend, you’re no nihilist.”
In my art History class we just finished the 20th century. My students’ lives barely skimmed the top of that century, while I lived completely immersed in half of it. I remember the horror of the photos from the Pacific war in books my father brought home. I remember the sound of the sirens in a film about the quiet hiding annex of Anne Frank’s family. True, I only experienced these from the safety of distance, but the horror entered my soul and has never left. The image linked here (at the MOMA in NYC) is typical of the art that emerged out of Europe after that time. On this side of the ocean, the work was much more confident, though the thinkers were not. I grew up on this side of the pond, pondering Abstract Expressionism, and Matisse’s effort at order with his cutouts. I looked and then lost interest in Warhol’s reproductions, his 15 minutes of fame. It’s been said that Warhol killed art, and philosophically that case can be made. If a pianist can go on stage, dressed for performance, sit down and then 4’33” later, no finger on the keys, stand and walk away, we are done. We might as well go home. But wait. . .where is home now, maybe that no longer exists as well?
That silence (the pianist would later need to explain) was the real piece. The awaited anticipation of the unsuspecting audience, filled with nervous coughs was the real work, he would tell us. The duration was the real ‘music’ and it was indeterminate. We just needed to take his word for it.
“When I hear what we call music”, John Cage (the pianist) later explained, “it seems to me that someone is talking”. . . “I don’t need sound to talk to me”. . . “it doesn’t have to mean anything”
He spent many meaningful words trying convince us of this.
But the immense problem is that we do not want to live this way, indeterminably. After the high brow concert we still want to go home. It was nice for a time, that silence; souls do love quiet. But quiet is only satisfying in a world where things will eventually make some sense. If indeterminate quiet is all we really have, we are completely un-done.
We raise our kids, and plan our days trusting that certain things will emerge, that important things do have meaning. Cage informed us otherwise, then needed to elaborate. He had to explain because we rubes need meaning. He looked down his nose at us, even as he had to add some kind of sense to his idea. Now we are all looking beyond him.
And artists are still making work after Wahol. If all is meaningless, then why make work? Marcel Duchamp admitted this, spending the rest of his life after rocking the art establishment, by just turning his back on it all and playing chess.
The nihilists are vacant, being challenged by some great work going on now with integrity and intelligence. There is also a lot of meaningless work. One of my students has decided that the work he wants to do “needs to have meaning”.
expect the unexpected
Working with Chinese inks on plastic paper has been bringing some interesting surprises, the most fun when I am just loosely holding an idea while the inks behave as inks do. There are certain boundaries I set, and then there are outer boundaries at work (like gravity, and viscosity). But the fun comes in the unexpected finish. I am working together in a sort of duet with these materials, and I rarely know what is going to happen next.
I do have a plan. I need to get 17 pieces done for a showing in November. I have been studying through Emily Dickinson’s work for a couple years, just finished. And lately I have been tracking through the emotional journey of another poet and prophet: Jeremiah the Hebrew. Just today I gave a lecture to students about how Michelangelo saw himself as Jeremiah—at least he chose that singular brooding figure on which to place his own resemblance in the Sistine chapel program. And there was a lot about that project that was a huge struggle for Michelangelo. He wrote about the days when his neck hurt and the plaster was all over him, and he doubted his ability. Oh, but the results.
Time moves. It is all ground for more work to be done until that set moment when all the work is done. I love the finish. But I am learning to enjoy the stretched out surprises in time too, and part of my reason is because I am not the one in charge.
working in flesh
My studio is a mess and unattended. Ideas have been stacking up, awaiting their turn. But just about every waking moment this semester has been tasked to a course I was given to teach. I love to simplify and to probe, and so Art History Survey II–which races through 7 centuries of art all around the globe was a treat and a culmination of years of thought. We’ve looked at the historical, scientific and philosophic precursors that have then shown up in the visual response through time. The big questions get asked again and again in all this work; we seem wired to ask and to seek, to keep on asking, to express and to provoke.
The text finishes near the present moment with this quote which I find telling. “Art in the new millennium seems to be heading in several directions simultaneously, constantly shifting and recalibrating new perspectives and concerns as part of an increasingly complicated global discourse.” You can see this in the visual results.
Stokstad and Cothren, Art History (Boston:Pearson, 2014) 1129.
But I go back to words that have moved me deeply, and set me again into wonder. In a letter to another artist, Vincent VanGogh said this in 1888:
“Christ alone–of all the philosophers, Magi, etc.—has affirmed as a principle certainty: eternal life, the infinity of time, the nothingness of death, the necessity and the raison d’être of serenity and devotion. He lived serenely, as a greater artist than all other artists, despising marble and clay as well as color, working in living flesh.”
dormancy
The little Maple volunteer, making it’s way toward light from underneath the canoe caught my attention this summer. It was rooted in a place that would not bode well for its survival. So I replanted it in good soil, placed it into a bright spot and it has been a happy little responder, even giving me another set of leaves. Right on schedule though, it changed with the cooler weather.
And I wonder now if I should bring it in. It was 11 degrees this morning. So I did a little reading about these kinds of things. It turns out that if I protect this seedling by sheltering it inside that the tree will die of exhaustion. It needs dormancy. It needs to slowly harden in the colder weather so that it can stay alive. I will need to watch the freezes so the roots can still get some moisture, but mostly this little tree I am training needs me to stay away and let it be as it chills.
This has me thinking about life cycles, about the nature of progression, about renewals that come only after certain periods, about expectations, about what is happening beneath the surface when signs look otherwise.
I cannot make this development happen. I am watching and I am wondering as I think about alot of other things I want to help develop. This little unlikely sprout is a good teacher.
persistence of meaning
In an afterschool program I am involved in, we have been continuing to look at the major themes in art as a means of understanding “why bother?” The kids I have are bothered by a lot of things in their young lives. I showed them some work by the Abstract Expressionists; and tried to explain how these guys insisted that art was for art’s sake alone; that it had no inherent meaning. The artists of this period had to use words to explain this insistence, for people looking at the random markings and collages, kept searching for meaning. I told the kids, “This is freedom day, your piece need not mean a thing, just tear the paper and. . .”
And here, I had to give some kind of guidelines for what makes a finished composition good (meaning?).
They started in. it was so interesting to me how even with freedom from meaning they kept trying to make meaning on their two dimensional panels.
The next time I came in, the theme for historical art making was “saying something that is true.” We looked at some important examples using Homer, and Grant Wood. How quickly the kids could catch the artist’s intent. Then it was their turn, continuing with torn paper. Their grasp on what is true easily focused on their own personal worlds, self portraits mostly. We only have about 45 minutes for the craft part of this curriculum. But they dive in and these are kids who feel little confidence otherwise. As we talked and worked they taught me a new text code: tmi=too much information. I laughed out loud at that, as I watched them work with their materials. Without words, without tmi, they were showing me in their constructions what was on their minds.
seeing value
I was in a workshop this past week, with a very able instructor. It is not easy teaching abstraction well, but she was a great model and help to me. I have come home now seeing value studies everywhere and I am sure it will affect my work, already has. Value, color, line—the basics. These are the kind of fundamentals we teach in beginning art school classes, that athletes speak of, kind of “here we go again” only better this time around.
I moved past a counter and got caught by the beauty just sitting quietly waiting to be noticed. A shadow reminded me of a great phrase I’d recently read from Emily Dickinson’s poem #132 “… and shadows tremble so—“
This I am realizing is an exercise in joy! Listen to this echo from Henri Nouwen “I am tempted to be so impressed by the obvious sadness of the human condition that I no longer claim the joy manifesting itself in many small but very real ways…” Joy is not denial, but rather a chance to see what’s really real. Value is found in the common made celebratory. Real things representing, hinting at, suggesting so much more.
quickening
So often I feel I am at the beginning of new, untested things. My active faith is the only thing that checks me from the despair I sense so often clouding around me. My heart responds to glimpses and quickenings. My eyes sometimes catch a beautiful flare, and then something deeper seems to move inside me like little wings. I am so glad to be a woman for I know already what that is about. I am eternally grateful to be anchored to Jesus, because there is nothing that is going to come down that He will not use as material toward the final resolution. It’s all His. This quiets me.
I have been reading Robert Henri too. This art teacher from a century ago has much that still resonates. He said that all art speaks, that all art (good art) is like sign posts. How come I never read this guy before? I believed this before and after it was fashionable. It probably still is unfashionable, who cares? I care. I hope to go to dust caring. I hope to record some of the signs before that. Henri taught that students would better craft if their model was in another room, so that they had to place on their canvas only the sense of what moved them from within as they had interacted and been pressed inwardly by the outer model. He was trying to train them away from copying and move into deeply mining the sensibility that was theirs uniquely. That is good advice. This prompts me then to post two little studies for comment.
This first I am calling for now: March Vision. It arose out of views that fed me as I drove through Southern VA in March. I wrote about that previously. This is the best I have of that so far.
This next study I am calling April Gesture. This took one fourth the time of the other one, it happened on site and as can be seen, very quickly. I have some opinions about these pieces, but I am going to hold them in check for now, for I am not sure yet what is coming further from this kind of work.
learning in community
A couple of my students from Spring ‘09 Color Theory told me that they loved the experience of community in their art classes. This interests me. To them, the chance to work together or along side each other with some tricky projects, to discuss and critique in developing relationships over time was a neat part of their growing college experience, and highly valued. I come from such a different time than these kids. When I was in college independent thinking and solo learning was expected. To come up with conclusions as a group would have been considered somewhat suspect, sloppy, or at least auxiliary to the more important solo work. It was every man/woman for himself (as if individuals on their own have all potential access to higher learning). I am changing my mind as I watch what happens when students get engaged and start problem solving together. There is a dynamic there in a group that seems larger than the sum of the parts; that is an exciting synthesis of possible outcomes in newer ways, and students emerge having caught things the teacher does not even yet know. I did have an unusual bunch of great kids this past term, I even thought several times, “maybe I should quit while I’m ahead”, for it is a lot of work anticipating and then evaluating with this kind of discovery approach to keep it still on track. But forged relationships move beyond the classroom and into life. This really interests me.
Continued Leaning in Community
I tried the same group approach to problem solving with some of my after school kids in a local Elementary School. We had 45 minutes to make a mural that showed what the group wanted to communicate. They swang into action, and what was fascinating to me was how they synthesized content quickly, coming to their own ideas and moved into tasks. Leaders emerged, specialists took their part and started to shine, helpers got joy in being necessary, and everybody had fun. Time stopped here, and we ended up with something that was the fruit of collaborative work that can never again be repeated. I expect the lessons learned there were more than just mural coloring.
I am also involved this summer with some adult learners, who are practicing ways to be better facilitators. It is the same thing I’ve been seeing happen with the college students and the grade schoolers. Get them involved, get them dialoging, get them trying and testing, and making mistakes and then evaluating. We can do this because we have a certain freedom to explore, AND a confident expectation that discovery is possible in a world where natural things can progress. It seems the very best learning happens this way. And as a teacher, I can facilitate this best when I am confident that the material can be tested and pushed this way and that, and still the authoritative kernels will sift out and show up, now all the better apprehended. This is an adventure of confident hope.