THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

R.M. Bacon School is still on my mind.  Facebook was filled this week with new photos of the 86th Anniversary celebration and a bunch of "white hairs" dancing - but the old photos, they got me thinking about those days again...

After the trauma of my reluctant first day, going and staying in kindergarten came easy.  

I soon found it was not that bad as we spent a lot of time putting together wooden puzzles, Miss Garton, (all teacher were called "miss" whether they were or not) would choose a person from each of our tables of 4 to go pick a puzzle from the rack.  I am not sure what pedagogical concept this enforced but we did and re-did these puzzles the whole year.   I always picked Little Boy Blue - it was by far the easiest and got this task over quickly.

We also did a lot of snacks.  Taking naps on rag rugs.  Drawing pictures with ancient stubs of crayons from a waxy box that was missing all of the good colors. I thought “this isn’t school, it play time with worn out toys.”   I guess I was expecting more as my mom and I played school many nights and her lessons seemed more challenging.  I wondered why we had to wait a whole year to get to the reading and the writing?

Breaking up the routine every other week was the visiting art teacher and her cart of wonders. 

She would wheel in and we would make paper chains for Christmas and papermache eggs for Easter.  Most all of art learning seemed to center around holidays for some reason.  But one day we were instructed to do a non-holiday task, to paint a picture of our house with those smelly mason jars of poster paints. 

Editors note:  After much study of this over many years watching my own kids, I conclude that every kid artist does the following - they work the paper vertically, a blue line across the top = the sky.  A green line across the bottom = the ground.  A box with a triangle on top is their house, always with smoke curling from a chimney.  Next to the house is a stick figure waving one hand = me.  Sometimes next to the stick kid is a smaller stick dog or cat.

So I got busy.  

I brushed a mixture of blue and white to tone down the brilliant blue of the alla prima approach to this work.  I turned the paper horizontally and floated my new sky tone down to form an horizon line that was a tad above the center.  I then started to dry brush out combinations of green and brown for the ground of the landscape when the "art" teacher came by.  "Calvin ! WHAT in the world are you doing???” she barked.  The whole class became silent.  She continued, "The sky isn’t supposed to come all the way down the paper...it should be a line across the top.  Too much paint here.  And why are you painting it long ways?"  To this day I remember my reply - it has stayed with me because it forged the foundation of the rest my life in the arts.

I replied, "Well I think that the land is big and it fits better long ways on the paper...and I think the sky always meets the ground?   She turned and said to Mrs. Garton, “this is the one who wouldn't come in the first day, right?  I knew he was going to be trouble.”  

And I was.

All my life of learning, painting and creating I questioned why and often had a troublesome inquiring mind as they say.  And years later I learned as a Fine Ars Education teacher that my take on the horizon and perspective as a kindergarten-er was not normal for that age.  Kids in kindergarten are supposed to see things flat.  Little did I know then  I was in a small minority whose inner eye saw the world differently.  Like the great masters - I was not understood, not appreciated in my time.

For the rest of that year, hard as it was,  I painted like everybody else in my class.  For as Picasso was fond to quote Hippocrates:  "Life is short, and art long, opportunity fleeting, experience perilous, and decision difficult."