Art

I had many pastimes when I was growing up. One of my favorite things to do was to draw pictures and if there was nothing else to do, I could always draw pictures. My father would bring home pads of paper that the students in the print ship had made, so we always had plenty of paper. We had a box of crayons, but one of my favorite gifts was to get a box of new Crayola® crayons. I loved the different colors and the smell of the crayons. I drew pictures of anything you could think of. Pictures from my imagination would spring to life on the blank white pages.

When I was young, before I started school, there was a program on TV called “Ding Dong School.” Miss Frances was the teacher and everyday we drew a different picture and learned our alphabet and numbers and sometimes we would do some sort of a craft project. After I had done my drawing and the show was over, my mother would hang up my picture just like Miss Frances hung up the pictures drawn by the children on the show. I was so proud to have my pictures hanging in the kitchen, a new one every day.

When I was in kindergarten, my father enrolled me in an art class for children at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, the local museum that also had a well-known art school. I went to the art school on Saturday mornings. To me, it was like going to heaven. I loved the smell of the paint in the studio and my teacher allowed me to draw and paint whatever I wanted, making suggestions as I drew or painted. I brought home all my art work to hang up.

One day when I came home with yet another picture that I had drawn or painted, my mother said, “Why don’t you make something useful like an ashtray or something? You can draw and paint at home.” She missed the whole point of the discovery class, which was for the teacher to guide us as we used our natural talents. The next week I experimented with making clay animals and eventually I did make a metal painted ashtray for my mother, but my true love was drawing pictures and painting.

Because my mother felt it was a waste of money to send me to art school when I could do the same thing at home, I did not return to the art school after my classes ended. I was very sad because I had felt so much at home in the art studio. I felt valued and productive and happy there. My mother did not see why they should pay for art lessons when I didn’t make anything useful or different. So my budding career as a artist was squashed early on. However, when we had art time at my school, that was my favorite time of the school week. We were not allowed to paint, and painting was rarely allowed at our house, too, but I was allowed to draw the pictures that I loved so much. I had so much imagination in pictures that I wanted to get out of my head and onto paper.

I believe that children should be allowed to expressive themselves creatively in the media with which they are most comfortable. My media was crayon and paint. Today I still like to sketch and draw and paint, as well as having discovered mosaics. These are my favorite pastimes.