Painting by the Numbers

I will take this first blog article as an opportunity to tell you a little bit about myself.  As a child, I never envisioned myself as an Artist. I certainly never envisioned myself as an Art Educator. While growing up in Connecticut, I spent most of my time and energy playing sports at a very competitive level and at the same time being completely lost in school. I spent my high school years knowing that I did not “get” what everyone else seemed to understand about school. A day in high school was a series of trips to different rooms where I had no idea what was taking place. Of course, these were also the days of drowsy allergy medicine, so being loopy on over-the-counter sinus medication did not help my situation either. All this was very tolerable because at the end of the day there was going to be some type of practice or game where things made much more sense to me. After almost not graduating from high school, I went onto college, a place where I quickly left due to flunking (and saying that I flunked is too proactive, I just stopped going). So I found myself, at the age of barely 19 years old, a college dropout without an interest in anything worthwhile. 

This was when a small paint-by-number work of art that hung in my parent’s living room changed my life.  A family friend who was artist saw this painting that I had completed as a young child and told my parents that I should take painting classes at the Danbury Art Center. Since I wasn’t busy on Tuesday nights (or any other night for that matter), I decided to go down to Main Street and see what painting was all about.  And it was literally that night, which things started to make a little bit of sense to me. The instructor showed me a book of Vincent Van Gogh paintings and, suddenly, I found something that I understood. Flipping thru that book of Van Gogh paintings was something that I “got.” For whatever reason, this visual language was something that I understood. This story, which is wrapped in a neat little bow, continues with me returning to college with a newfound ability to perform simple to complex learning tasks that had previously baffled me. This experience is certainly not unique to me and is a story that we hear often within Art Education. My point is not to give you any great insight into my own life but to speak to Art’s unique ability to give our students an encounter with learning.

Because my involvement with Art began later in life, I tend to be fascinated by stories of individual’s first experiences with art. I will assume that you must have some fascinating and meaningful stories of your involvement with Art. So the first conversation that I would like to begin with is, when did you begin to learn how to learn thru the Arts? My moment was a white light experience, but yours may be a spiritual experience of the educational variety? Regardless of the profundity of the moment, when did Art become important to you?

I look forward to hearing of your varied experiences and conversing with you over the next month.