I've Been Thinking About My Art Teacher
and wishing I could tell her how she changed my life
Is it just me, or do we no longer ask every small child we encounter what he or she wants “to be” when they grow up? Perhaps it’s only that I no longer run in parents-of-young-children circles, but I like to think that we have wised up. That we have finally noticed how little “being” has to do with the work that keeps us solvent.
Of course, the question has a life of its own and can return to haunt young adults of a certain temperament. We recently moved my second-born into his college dorm along with a stack of books written by ancient Greeks and Romans. He is simultaneously thrilled about his course of study and terrified that the things he loves will never add up to a proper job, let alone a career.
When I was a child I answered the question of what I wanted to be with the word “artist.” I’m not sure what I imagined that word to mean. In some ways, I was wrong about the life I would lead, and about the age of nine I began to try out answers that seemed to me to be more “practical,” answers like “architect” and later “interior designer” and then “architect” again. It is true that I do not wear a red beret and carry a paint-splattered palette like I did for my Halloween piano recital in sixth grade, and yet in many ways I was exactly right about the trajectory my life would take.
In high school, I filled all of my elective classes with Art. My teacher was tall and blonde as a Viking, and she had retained the impressive beehive hairdo of her youth. She was a strange sight in the halls of my small town Texas high school in the early 90s. I think students who only knew her from hallway sightings may have laughed at her appearance, but her students never laughed. We sat at our tables, eyes and hands engaged with the projects she set us, while she talked quietly but insistently about the things she loved most. Instead of farming or football, we heard about her annual trips to Nantucket, the art film she’d seen over the weekend, or the New York City muralists featured on a recent episode of CBS Sunday Morning. New York City and Nantucket might as well have been Narnia. To me they seemed too distant to be real, but slowly, over years of art class, they began to take shape as real places in a real world of real and diverse beauty.
My art teacher did not offer false praise. She never contradicted the evidence of my own eyes which told me I had enough talent to enjoy art class but not enough to justify art school or an art degree. In English class, I could sometimes rise to the level of “best.” In art class, I never could, and I understood without grief or rancor that I never would. And yet somehow the life I am living today has its roots all the way back in my art teacher’s classroom. She taught us to properly sharpen our drawing pencils, how to mix colors, how to really look at the thing we were aiming to depict, but her most enduring lessons were these:
Beauty matters. Go in search of it!
Place matters. Travel and bring your ideas home!
Art is everywhere. Even the movie theater!
She taught me that artists aren’t only those who can use a pencil or paintbrush with ease. Artists are those who see. And art is a way of life.
When I am asked about my work—about what it is that I “do”—I answer writer. It feels truthful but somehow incomplete. A more complete answer, however, would only impede the conversation. How could I possibly explain what I mean by the word artist? How could I explain that I don’t paint on canvas, but I do paint walls? That I don’t sketch with a pencil but with flower seeds? And how could I convince anyone in a brief conversation that I think more of us (all of us?) should live as artists?
My art teacher showed me that an artistic life is a life in which “practical” and “sensible” take a backseat to “beautiful” and “delightful.” An artist finds joy in a long-planned trip to Nantucket Island, but she also delights in the potted plant curling its ivy tendrils up toward the drip in the faucet. Artists make things, but artists also spend a great deal of time enjoying those things made by others—whether they be art films or sunsets.
Today, I write (look at me! writing!), but I also grow flowers. Sometimes I pick them and create elaborate arrangements, but mostly I simply admire them from my bedroom window every morning when I raise the shade. Today, I rearrange furniture in a Black Barn so a local friend can host a bridal shower, another friend can host a retreat, and one more can have a weekend away with her husband. Today, I browse cookbooks and try new recipes because they are colorful and look delicious. Today, I spread paint samples in the tiny mudroom that is also a laundry room and powder room and wonder which color would look welcoming and show the least actual mud. And today, I still watch CBS Sunday Morning and dream of one day traveling all the way to Nantucket.
I live nearer to Nantucket now. I’ve never been, but it no longer feels like an imaginary land. Maybe that is enough. Life is very full with other beauties and other delights—even this cup of coffee, this newsletter to you. But I think one day I will actually make the trip if only to say thank you to the teacher who changed my life by opening my eyes to her life.
A few links for fun:
Nantucket hasn’t become my place, but the Berkshires of Massachusetts have. Jonathan and I first visited when we were newlyweds, and we have enjoyed taking our kids for summer trips and autumn trips to a region with beautiful mountains and fantastic art museums. This October we’ll be back in Lenox, Mass. with our younger two. During one summer visit, my kids somehow got it into their heads that they wanted to visit MASSMoCA. It’s a contemporary art museum housed in a vast industrial building. I kept refusing to take them, sure that they would hate the strange, contemporary art, but we all loved it. It was strange, but also wonderful, impressive, awe-inspiring.
On one summer vacation museum visit, we bought this game, and it’s still a family favorite. Lest you think my kids share their mother’s interest in art history, I'’m pretty sure it’s less about the art for them and more about the wheeling and dealing.
I still love one of the movies my art teacher rhapsodized about: Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence starring Daniel Day-Lewis. She was especially taken with the long camera shot that follows the main character as he moves from room to room during a ball in a grand New York mansion encrusted with painting and sculpture and gilded decoration.
My art teacher’s monologue on this film was my introduction to the work of American writer Edith Wharton. In a full circle moment, our return to Lenox, Mass this fall will also be our return to Wharton’s Lenox home The Mount. The last time we were there, the gardens included an exhibition of outdoor sculpture with such strange and strangely beautiful pieces we still talk about them in our family. Remember the ghost figures in the woods? someone will say. And we do. We remember.
