I am not an artist.
I've never painted a portrait nor have I ever thrown clay to make a beautiful piece of pottery.
Ok, once I did make a pinch pot in the fourth grade but it was probably a disaster.
As far as having any real artistic talents, I have none.
That's why it seems so weird that I would even write this post.
Earlier this week, I had my 3rd grade students at Big Pasture Elementary make a fall picture. It was my intent to take their works of art down to the store that Mike manages here in town and put them on display for the month of October. I wasn't really sure what kind of fall picture to have them make, but after looking online for a while I came up with the idea of just a simple tree with torn construction paper leaves upon it. It seemed easy enough and so we set to work.
Not sure how it came about, but one of the kids asked why I wasn't making a picture. I'm sure the first words that came out of my mouth were something like....
"I'm not an artist. I don't make good trees."
But you know how kids are. A couple more of them asked me to make one too and so what else could I do? I got the paper and set about making one of my own. At first it seemed quite ridiculous. In 39 years of teaching I have never once drawn a picture alongside of my students. In my mind, I already had the notion that whatever I drew would look absolutely silly and perhaps even unidentifiable. Yet with pencil and crayons at the ready, I set about the task. I shuddered to think about what the finished product might look like. I prayed that the 8-year olds in my class would not laugh at it and the crazy thing is this.....
They said it looked nice.
And because they said it looked nice, I began to believe it myself. Yesterday I left it in its half finished state, taped to the white board in my room. When I got to school this morning, I decided "what the heck?" and finished it up. There I was at 6:00 in the morning sitting at my teacher's desk with a crayon in my hand adding the last minute details that I wanted to include. In its finished form, it looked simple at best but there was something that I liked about it. I can't tell you what it was, but something was there that I had never seen before.
I had actually drawn a tree and the weird thing was this.
It really appeared to be a tree.
Those 19 children have no idea how their kind words affected me yesterday. I went from a person nearly 61 years old who had never once wanted to show anything she did to another person to one who thought that maybe there was hope for her after all. I was so surprised at how my fall tree turned out, that I asked a young man in my classroom to take a picture of me holding it. I might just hold on to that picture in the years yet to come as a reminder to me that it really is never too late to try something new.
I won't make my living in the art world and plan to leave the serious stuff to the people whose God given talents lend them towards that profession. But you know what? I won't be afraid to try and draw something again the future and share it with the people around me. Out of the mouths of innocent little children, those words came yesterday.
"Mrs. Renfro, that is a really nice tree you drew!"
And you know what?
They were right!
No comments:
Post a Comment