A Year of Collages

More than two years ago, I started a daily art practice, and after a year of daily watercolor paintings, I switched to daily doodles which quickly morphed into daily collages, and for the past year, I have sat down each day and made a cut paper collage on a piece of 6x8 inch mixed media paper. Even on those rare days when I don’t have the time or energy and can’t make one, I make up for it the next day, and if you follow me on Facebook or Instagram, you may have seen some of the collages that I post each day.

Today, I stacked all of them together and the stack was more than fourteen inches tall. It’s such a visual impact to see them all stacked together. It’s one thing to thing about how I made one each day for the last 366 days (it is a Leap Year!). It’s a completely different thing to see the teetering stack of them standing in front of me.

My daily art practice isn’t about making a masterpiece each day, and it’s not about being able to brag about having a daily practice, though it’s good to toot your own horn every now and then. It’s about dedicating the time to create. Sometimes, I love what I make, and other times, what I make just doesn’t work. And out of the 366 pieces that I have made, I would probably say that there’s only a couple dozen that I feel really work. But sitting down everyday and making something with the same materials, pushes me to explore and experiment with themes and and images, and I feel like I have grown so much as an artist over the past year. And I have this bank of ideas for ideas for future work.

I’m just showing up everyday and planting creative seeds and seeing which ones grow.

Over the course of the past year, I’ve had a lot of folks ask me what I planned on doing with them, and many have suggested deploying them and having an exhibit. So, I am pleased to announce that I will display them at the Round Hill Arts Center for the month of May. I am simply going to pin them to the wall, and I am looking forward to seeing all 366 of the collages hanging together.

I’ll share more details in the coming days, and I hope that those of you close to the Northern Virginia area can come see it once the exhibit is hung.

In the meantime, I’ll continue creating and sharing my daily collages, and I look forward to seeing where my ideas and my art take me.

Seeds

I’m a firm believer that we are all creative, but many folks have lost touch with their creativity—they’ve lost the connection. There are a myriad of reasons for this disconnection, and it doesn’t matter what they are. What matters is that you can get back in touch with it. You can reconnect to it.

Creativity isn’t confined to art or music or any of the other disciplines we deem creative. There’s no such thing as creatives and non-creatives, though the business world tries to convince us otherwise. Creativity plays a key role in every aspect of our lives. We often don’t see it that way though. It often flies under the radar because we’re not painting a masterpiece or composing a symphony or writing a sonata. But creativity resides in the way that we solve problems and in the way we make choices. It inhabits our hobbies and shows up in simple everyday chores. We just are unaware of it. We can’t live without exploring and using our creativity. In simply buying clothes, decorating our living spaces, cooking dinner, trying to impress a date, or buying a present for someone close to us, we are expressing our creativity. These are all creative moments, but we’ve been lulled into believing that creativity only happens to special people doing special things. However creativity is ordinary and everyday.

Like so many things in our lives, we are unconscious and unaware of the role that creativity plays in our lives, but once we start to see how creativity is simply entrenched in the way we live and we become aware of it, we can cultivate it. We can purposefully and intentionally nurture it. It’s like we are planting tiny seeds, and we can chose which ones receive our time, our attention, our care. We can nurture the seed of creativity or we can nurture the seed that is the denial of our creativity.

How are you nurturing your creativity?

Mom's Last Angel

As an artist, I’m sometimes asked if I come from a family of artists, and I have to answer no. My mom worked in the bakery department of a grocery store and later became a homemaker after hurting her back, and my dad worked in a feed mill and then drove truck. I may not have grown up in house with painters and sculptors, but I did grow up surrounded by creativity, from my sister and brother playing instruments to my mom singing, always singing, and my dad playing handy man and Mr. Fix-It around the house. And perhaps it’s one of my earliest memories that actually set me on the path to being an artist. I vividly remember sitting around the table in our toy room making holiday crafts with my mom, sister, and brother when I was very young. I don’t know if it was because we didn’t have many decorations at the time or if it was just a way to keep three young children busy. I was probably three at the time, and my mom had a stack of construction paper, scissors, and glue. We made paper loop chains, Christmas trees, snowmen, and Santas with cotton balls for the beard. I think that was the moment where I realized that you could take a blank piece of paper and create an entire world with it whether with scissors and glue or with pencil and crayon.

But my mom’s crafting and making didn’t stop there. She was always creating things—from hand stitching book bags for us kids when we were little from old jeans, to making a play set for us with marker and construction paper on a big piece of board with roadways and parking lots so we could play with our Matchbox cars. And of course, I remember how excited she was when she got her sewing machine—the sewing machine that still sits in the kitchen by the basement steps where she left it from the last time she used it. She made her own window treatments, altered her clothes, and made her own blankets from two flat sheets and some batting. She was always devising something to make or alter, and that extended to her cooking and baking. My mom was a great cook and an even better baker, and though she would get recipes from family and friends, she would alter and change them to suit her tastes—a little extra water in the chocolate chip cookies, a few different ingredients for the sauce for Aunt Ludi’s shish kabobs. Just little tweaks to fit her tastes.

Now if you really knew my mom, you’d know how particular she was—some would say pig headed or obstinate, but things had to be a particular way—HER way. They had to meet HER tastes and HER sensibilities, and that went for the things that she collected, as well. Whether it was trivets, or angels, or wind chimes, she was always changing and altering them because something about them just didn’t sit right with her. When helping Dad go through somethings after Mom died, we found a box of wind chimes—new chimes—where she had cut all the strings just so that she could restring them her way with the string she wanted to use. They just didn’t measure up to her standards. We also found many unfinished sewing projects. With some of them, we weren’t even sure what she had in mind to do with them. And that brings me to one final unfinished thing—something that she wasn’t totally pleased with—something that she wanted to change and alter to fit her particular sensibilities—something that she never had a chance to finish. I call it her last angel.

Apparently she bought this angel and didn’t like how it was painted, so as Dad told me, she used paint stripper to remove the paint and painted it her way. She wasn’t satisfied with what she had done, and stripped it again. The problem is the angel is plastic resin, and the stripper began to eat through the plastic creating holes. She tried glue, silicone caulk, Play Doh, plaster, and probably lots of other things to fix the holes. But nothing worked. And she used more stripper and more stripper which just made the holes bigger, and eventually it ate away at the waist of the angel, and made the angel fall into two separate pieces. She just couldn’t get it fixed.

Dad asked me if I could fix it. Mom had worked so hard on it and tried so many things, but just couldn’t solve the problem. Perhaps I could figure out a way to get it back together and paint it in someway that Mom might like. So I took it back home to Virginia, and over the last month and a half, I cleaned it and scrubbed it and picked plaster and clay and glue and caulk off of it. After it was clean and dry, I used a special epoxy clay to fill the many holes and to get the two separate pieces back together. It took a couple weeks since I worked a little at a time, and the harden clay had to be carved and sanded so it blended into the rest of the sculpture.

I then painted it with acrylic paint. I think it was originally painted in a realistic manner with flesh tones for the skin and blue on the wings. But I kept thing that it needed to look like stone, so I started off with a solid grey and then used a watered down black to fill in all of the crevices and details. I wiped the black off of the raised parts, and it gave it the appearance of weathers stone. I was able to get it done just in time for her memorial service this past weekend.

It’s probably not how Mom had envisioned it, but I painted it the way that I saw it. After all, for me this angel is a memorial to my mom and her creativity and her problem solving—a memorial to her particular tastes and pig headedness, and what’s a better memorial than a “stone” angel. I’m glad that I got to do this last thing for Mom and bring back her angel. It’s not unfinished anymore.

So, no, I don’t come from a family of artists, but I come from a family full of creativity—a family that figures out how to solve problems and to fix them. And that’s what being an artist is—creatively solving problems. I will always remember Mom’s crafting and making, and I will always remember her as someone who passed that desire to make and create onto me.

My 50th Birthday!

I just turned 50, as in yesterday was my birthday. Like most folks who turn fifty, I’m left scratching my head with a slight puzzled look on my face thinking, “Half a century, huh?” I’m not freaked out about it. I’m not feeling too old, But there is something very rounded, almost symmetrical about being 50 years old. After all it’s halfway to 100. Oh, if I live that long. Whatever it is, reaching this age is a milestone like so many of the ages that end in a “0”. You hit 10, and you’re into double digits. You’re a big kid. You hit 20, and you’re more of an adult than you were at 18, but not quite as much of one as you are at 21. Then there’s 30, and you don’t feel so young and hip as you once did. At 40, you can really say that you’re middle aged. Then there’s 50, and by most estimations, it’s over the hill, that is if you don’t live to be more than 100. But for the majority of us, when we reach 50, we have more years behind us then in front of us. 50 may be just be barely over the hill, but we’ve definitely crested it. And it’s downhill from here.

For such a monumental occasion, I wanted to celebrate. When I turned 40, we had a big party and invited a bunch of friends to our house. It was a great evening of food, friends, music, and conversation. For 50, I wanted to have something a bit more low key—something more just for me. At first, I thought about having a guys weekend with some good buddies like we did last year when a close friend turned 50, but when you’re birthday is only three days before Christmas, there are already so many plans and commitments. I decided instead, on a solo getaway, and I couldn’t think of a better place to be than a cabin in the woods. Unfortunately, I don’t have an uncle or other relative that just happens to have a cabin in the woods, so I settled for one of the state parks here in Virginia. Most of Virginia’s state parks have cabins that you can rent, often near a lake, and I looked for parks that offered small cabins along with good hiking trails. I discovered that a few of the parks had small, efficiency cabins—a perfect size and cost for me. Only one park, Fairy Stone State Park had an efficiency cabin available for the time I wanted to go. This past week, I found myself up in southern Virginia by a lake staying in a log cabin at Fairy Stone State Park that was built back in the 1930s or 40s by the Civilian Conservation Corps.

I had a great time. I decided to approach it like solo retreat and kept to a flexible schedule, so I was up at 6am each morning, had breakfast, and then spent about 20 minutes meditating. Then by 8am I was out for a hike. Each day was a different hike anywhere from one to two and half hours. Then it was back to the cabin to make my daily collage and do some visual journaling. Lunch was at noon, and then it was back out for smaller afternoon hike around an hour long. Except for the day, I had to run to the grocery store to get a few things that I hadn’t even thought about needing when I packed, but I still managed to get in the bike after running my Errand. After my afternoon hike, I read and napped. Then it was some journaling and making art in the afternoon. Around 5pm, I started dinner, at least those two nights when I actually cooked. My last evening was a dinner of leftovers. By the time I had eaten and done the dishes, it was around 7pm and I hunkered down for an evening journaling session. Then some time to relax and read before going to bed. It was good to have a rhythm to the day that had some active parts, some artmaking parts, and some parts for rest.

No tv, no internet, no streaming videos, no social media. It’s amazing how disconnecting from all of that can be such a creative boost. But, I didn’t set out with any productivity goals in mind. I wasn’t going to write the great American novel or paint 50 masterpieces. I just wanted time to myself and for myself to make, move, read, and rest. It was glorious to give myself such a gift. It was a wonderful experience, and it helped me clarify some very important things and decide on some new directions for things to come. I’m already thinking about how my experience might translate into a retreat type of thing in the future for others to reconnect with themselves.

I was sad that last morning as I packed up. Though I couldn’t wait to get home and see my wife and my animals and to sleep in my own bed, I had a longing to stay for a few more days. There was just something about being in that small cabin with a blazing fire in the fireplace each night and reconnecting with myself. I can’t recommend the experience enough, and I encourage everyone to find the time and the place to go in solitude and spend time with themselves and for themselves.

I can’t wait to do it again, and I’d definitely go back to Fairy Stone.

I hope that the ending of one year and the beginning of another will bring you time to reconnect with yourself, your friends, and your family. I wish you a bright New Year!

Fairy stones that I found my last morning. These curious, geometrical stones give the park it’s name!

Rick Rubin and The Creative Act

I just finished reading Rick Rubin’s book, The Creative Act. If you’re not familiar with Rubin, you are most likely familiar with his work. He is a music producer who founded Def Jam Recordings back in the 80’s and has worked with a wide variety of legendary musicians and artists throughout his career, like the Beastie Boys, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica, Johnny Cash, and many more. So, Rubin definitely knows a thing or two about creativity, but to be honest not much from the book really stands out for me.

Maybe it’s because I’ve read, studied, and thought a lot about creativity, but nothing in the book really hit me as earth shattering and ground breaking. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a well written book, and there’s a lot of good stuff in the book with a lot of practical advice. It’s just more of a collection of reflections and essays on creativity than a cohesive statement on creativity, and maybe that’s why nothing is really jumping out at me.

The one thing that did stand out is the way Rubin ties together the mystical and the practical. Like a lot of creators, Rubin describes creativity in very mystical and mythical ways, but then goes on to give very practical advice like showing up everyday. But the more and more that I delve into the creativity, the more I am convinced that it is much more practical than mystical.

A lot of artists, writers, and musicians use flowery and ethereal language to describe creativity, and it can definitely feel that way, especially since a lot of creative insight can seem like it comes out of no where. But I wonder if that flash of insight that seems to hit like lightning is just how the human mind is wired. We take in all of these stimuli—sights, sounds, ideas, and so much more—and our minds are just constantly sifting through all of this data and making connections, even when we’re not conscious of it. Then seemingly out of nowhere we’re hit with an idea—often when we’re mowing the yard or walking the dog or washing the dishes. But is it some divine flash of insight? Is it the Muse whispering in our ear? Or is it just our brains making sense of all of this stuff that we’ve taken in? Are we simply priming our brains when we work and make and create and getting it ready to have those insights?

I don’t have the answers, but I do believe that there are definitely practical things that we can do to tap into our creativity more often. If we sit around waiting for those creative insights to strike like lightning, then we end up sitting around and waiting a lot. If we’re making and doing and thinking, those insights are going to hit more frequently because we’re constantly priming ourselves with ideas.

What practical things do you do to tap into your creativity?

We Are All Uniquely Creative

Picasso famously said, “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”

With all of my years working with young children, I definitely believe it. Children are bubbling over with creativity and curiosity. They sing and dance, draw and tell stories. The pretend and imagine, ask questions and seek to understand. It’s why I believe that everyone is uniquely creative. The creativity and curiosity that we had as children doesn’t just dry up and disappear. We may have closed ourselves off from it as we grew older and conformity and fitting in became greater and greater concerns. We may simply not see how we are creative believing that we’re not creative geniuses or that we’re not artsy or musical or literary.

However, we are creative in many practical ways in our lives, and we are always making creative decisions whether we see them as creative or not. Creativity isn’t only for special people or only for certain types of people doing certain activities. We are all creative. We have only lost sight of it. We have to open ourselves once again to our creativity and try seeing the world like we did as children and fill ourselves with wonder and curiosity.

We create our world through our choices. So, what kind of world are we creating for ourselves, for our loved ones, and for our fellow humans?

Consistency

As a kid, I loved to draw, and I drew all of the time. However, as I got older, especially when I got into high school and college, it seemed like I had to be in the mood to draw and to make art or I had to be deeply inspired. I would sit down to draw, and if I wasn’t “feeling it,” I just gave up and waited for a day when I was “feeling it.” That just meant that I made art infrequently. It was just so sporadic waiting around to feel inspired and in the mood.

Now that those days are long behind me, and I’ve spent many years making art and teaching art, I find that making art and being creative is really about consistency. When we consistently show up to our art, we improve our skills and our craft, but we also don’t need to wait around for inspiration to strike. Consistently showing up and getting to work makes it so much easier to get into our art because we’re not waiting around for the muse to sit on our shoulder and whisper in our ear.

It’s amazing how ideas flow when we just engage with our making repeatedly and consistently. When we get our hands moving and making over and over again, ideas just seem to spark. It helps if we have easy ways to engage with our art, and easy ways to get started. When we try to envision a big, complex project, we can be easily daunted by the scope and the complexity. But if we can find a way to sit down and make for 15, 20, or 30 minutes a day, it’s incredible what that time adds up to.

I’ve been engaging in daily artmaking for probably two years now, and I sit down every morning for 30 minutes to an hour and make something. Here lately it’s been daily collages, and even if I can only find 5 minutes, I find a way to make something. It has added up over all of that time, and it has become a habit. It feels strange when I haven’t had time to make my daily art. There are just some days that are super busy where I need to me up and going early in the morning, and I don’t have a chance for my daily making. On days like that, I usually find myself working for 5 or 10 minutes right before bed. Making something so quickly forces me to work quickly and intuitively, and often, it’s these quick 5 or 10 minute works that seem to open up new directions and new ideas.

It’s amazing what can happen when you show up everyday and make something.

How are you showing up consistently for your art? And if you’re not, how can you start?

I am. . .

I am a teacher at heart, and it’s teaching and sharing my art with others that really gives me purpose. Whether I’m in a classroom with students or making a video for YouTube, it’s my desire to help others connect with their creativity that energizes me and motivates me.

Yes, I’m also an artist. I live and breathe art, and I sit down everyday and engage in my artmaking. But I don’t pursue all those things that artists have to do to get their art out there and make a name for themselves. I don’t go to art openings and make connections with curators and gallery owners in order to get exhibitions, and the few exhibitions that I’ve had over the years have been because of someone else working on my behalf. I’m terrible at promoting and selling my art, especially online, and even when I’m fortunate to sell something, I cringe at having to pack up the art and head over to the post office to send it off. I sell most of my work in person at conferences and workshops where people often know who I am and what I do, and want to take a small piece of mine home with them.

I love making the work, and I think that my work is good. I’d love if I could sell more of it, but I’m just not into pursuing all of that other stuff. It just does’t interest me.

But I love sharing my work and how I make it. I love helping others discover their artistic voice, and I love being a small inspiration for others.

I believe that art can can have a huge impact on the world, but I believe that helping individuals uncover their creative voice can have an even bigger impact. I don’t think my art will ever change the world, but I believe my teaching will.

The Power of Creativity

We are all uniquely creative.

I’ve been making art for more than four decades and teaching art for nearly three, and I’ve become very passionate about creativity, and I am very interested in helping others tap into their creativity. Unfortunately, many folks simply believe that they are not creative and the world is divided into creatives and non-creatives, with the latter group making up the larger percentage of the population since creativity is reserved for only “special” people.

I can’t help thinking of my own journey. Creativity wasn’t ever really mentioned or talked about—not in my art classes in middle and high school—not in my drawing, painting, sculpture, or design classes in college—not in my art education classes as I learned about teaching art. Creativity was just taken for granted, and either you had it or you didn’t. When I heard artists, musicians, and film makers talk about creativity, it was always this very aloof thing. It was magical and mystical, and they talked of the muse landing on their shoulder and whispering inspiration into their ears. Or they talked of divine inspiration coming down from heaven above.

Creativity was never presented as a practical thing, and only special people could tap into its ethereal magic.

But what if I said that creativity is practical, that you didn’t have to be special, and in fact, that each and everyone of us is creative. We have just lost touch with it, but each one of us is a fountain of amazing creativity. Most of us have just been turned off from it, but it’s there inside of us. We just have to tap into it.

How do I know this? How do I know that everyone is creative?

Let’s look at children. If you have children, teach children, know children, or have any experience with children, especially around the ages of five and six, you know how they are bubbling over with curiosity and energy. They draw with fearlessness. They break out into song and dance at any moment. They build and they play. They are little, creative machines. One study has found that 98% of five year olds score at the creative genius level, while the same study found that only 2% of adults do.

What happens to us as we grow up and grow older?

How do all of these astonishingly creative little people grow up to people who only see themselves as utterly uncreative? We were all immensely creative as young kids, full of inquisitive tenacity, and we were fearless with our creative energies. Along the way, though, we’ve reigned it in, pulled it back, and denied it. The majority of us go about our daily lives believing that we are in no way creative. We’re not like da Vinci, Beethoven, Einstein, or Madame Curie. We won’t make any major breakthroughs or create masterpieces that will live on for hundreds of years. But really, who will? It doesn’t mean that we’re not creative because we’ll never be creative geniuses that are remembered throughout history. But we are all uniquely creative.

I want to tell you a story—a true story about growing up in a rural area just south of Pittsburgh. I didn’t grow up in what most people would describe as a creative family. I wasn’t surrounded by musicians and artists. My dad worked in a feed mill and later became a truck driver, and my mom worked in the bakery department of a grocery store. I grew up playing baseball and football and roaming the acres of woods that surrounded our house. But I also grew up drawing. I loved to draw. I didn’t have artists in the family to look up to, but I had my parents.

Looking back, I see now that it was a remarkably creative environment. We were poor, and when you’re poor, you have to be creative by necessity. We couldn’t always afford new stuff, and one of my earliest memories was making Christmas decorations with my mom. She had a stack of construction paper, and showed my sister, my brother, and me how to make paper chains, snowmen, Santa Clauses, and Christmas trees. She didn’t have a how-to book, and this was back in the dark ages before the Internet and YouTube. She figured it all out on her own so that we would have Christmas decorations that year.

I remember my dad fixing everything in the house. The dryer would stop drying clothes, and my dad would take it apart, figure out what was wrong, get the correct part and fix it. The car didn’t pass inspection because of bad brakes or big rusty holes in the fender, my dad would figure out how to put new brakes on, or how to patch up the holes in the fender with some sheet metal, a pop rivet gun, and some Bondo. He just figured it out.

This is what I saw all the time growing up, as my parents figured out creative ways to solve problems and fix things because we were poor and couldn’t always afford new things or to get things repaired professionally. Even though, my parents never considered themselves creative, and they were only doing what they had to do, they consistently used their creativity, and that was my environment growing up.

Imagine if we all could recognize how we use our creativity in practical, everyday ways. Imagine if creativity wasn’t such a mystical and mysterious thing, and we didn’t have to wait around for the muse or for divinity, and we could just tap into our creativity whenever we wanted. Image if we could harness that creative exuberance that we all had as kids, and use that power as adults.

How would our world be different?

But here’s the thing. We can. We can tap into our creativity. We can use that power of childhood creative curiosity as adults. We don’t have to wait around for the muse to land on our shoulder or listen for a divine voice on the wind. We are all uniquely creative, and we can impact this world in extraordinary ways when we accept and embrace our creativity.

We just have to consistently show up and get work.

Sami and the Magic Place

As many of you know, I don’t teach projects whether I’m teaching little kids or adults. I like to teach about the artmaking process, and I don’t focus on a product or a project. Many folks have a hard time understanding why I teach this way, so I wrote a little story that I hope shines a little light on my perspective. Sometimes we can illustrate our ideas more clearly through a story than an explanation. I hope that you enjoy the story.

Sami and the Magic Place

Like most five year old children, Sami was brimming with creative confidence. She was an artist, a singer, an actor, a dancer, an explorer, and so much more. She sang along to her favorite animated musicals, and acted out each part. She made mud pies after heavy rains, and mixed in leaves, twigs, and grass as she created her magical concoctions. She played and danced, sang and laughed.

But Sami liked drawing the best where she could create her own worlds and her own characters, and she knew she wanted to be an artist someday when she grew up. She spent countless hours drawing and coloring, as she invented stories of a brave princess who fought dragons and rode unicorns over rainbows. But she didn’t just draw the princess and her adventures, Sami drew all the cats and dogs she would some day have because having a dad who was allergic to pets meant no furry animals in the house, and she drew the houses and castles that she would some day live in. And she drew all sorts of other things — flowers and bumble bees, mermaids and pirate ships, monsters and aliens. Sami was fascinated with the marks that came out of pencils, markers, and crayons that turned into people and animals and anything that she could image.

When Sami turned six, it was almost time for her to go to school. She was so excited that for months, she kept asking her mom and dad when she would get to go. All throughout the hot months of summer she pestered her parents asking several times a day when school would start. She looked forward to going to kindergarten where not only would she meet new friends, but she could share her love of drawing and art. She looked forward to sharing her drawings of the brave princess and her drawings of flowers and cats and pirates and monsters. She just couldn’t wait.

Finally, the day arrived, and Sami went excitedly off to her first day of kindergarten. That afternoon, Sami enthusiastically recounted her first day of school to her mom from the backseat of the car, and then she shared the most exciting news of the day. 

“And, Mom, you know what? You know what, Mom?” Sami said quickly unable to hold back the gush of words.

“No. What?” her mother answered back.

“We get to go to art class once a week for the WHOLE YEAR!” Sami said wide-eyed as she clenched her hands near her chin. She was almost overwhelmed by the thought that they would get to go make art each and every week.

Sami was so excited about her first day of art class, that she could think of little else, and the night before her first class, she kept pondering all of the possible things she would make as she went to bed. It took her a little while to fall asleep, but as she drifted into sleep that night, she dreamt of the brave princess and a boat full of pirates as they danced from the tip of a crayon and drifted across a piece of paper.

The next day at school, Sami walked down the hall with the rest of her classmates and stood nervously in the hall outside of Ms. Beth’s room — the art room. Sami could barely contain her excitement, and she marveled at the brightly colored posters as she walked in and saw all manner of the amazing things on the shelves and on the counters. This was truly a magical place, Sami thought.

Sami sat attentively as Ms. Beth explained the rules and procedures of the artroom, and when it came time to make art, Ms. Beth explained that they were going to make flowers. Sami thought to herself, “Great! I love to draw flowers. I know how to draw all kinds of flowers.”

She eagerly took her piece of paper as Ms. Beth passed it out. Sami placed the paper on her table, but she noticed that there were flowers already drawn on it. As she looked around at the papers sitting in front of the other students at her table, she noticed that they already had drawings of flowers on their papers as well. In fact, everyone had the exact same drawing of flowers. Sami’s heart sank a little as she settled back into her seat and screwed up her mouth in disappointment.

Ms. Beth explained that they were going to be coloring in the flowers with crayon and that they were to color in each petal, leaf, and stem carefully trying to stay inside of the lines and to take their time. Sami brightened up as she took some crayons from the box in the middle of the table, and began coloring her flower. She wanted her flowers to be really colorful and different than everyone else’s, so she began coloring her petals with multicolored stripes. She then moved on to coloring her stems bright blue and the leaves flaming orange. She loved how vivid the colors were, but then Ms. Beth came over to the table, and paused next to Sami taking a long look at her paper.

“Now, Sami,” Ms. Beth began, “flowers don’t look like that.”

“I know,” replied Sami. “I wanted my flowers to be really bright, and I love bright colors.”

“Well, you’ll just have to start again,” said the teacher as she took Sami’s multicolored flowers away and gave her a new paper. “The stems and leaves need to be green and the petals can be bright colors but only use one or two colors on them.”

Ms. Beth walked away to another table, and Sami sank into her chair. She reluctantly pulled the new paper with the flowers that she didn’t draw closer to her, and began coloring the leaves and stems green and all of the petals pink.

When Sami’s mom picked her up that day, she noticed that Sami seemed rather quiet knowing how excited she was for her art class when she dropped her off in the morning. Her mom looked at Sami in the rear view mirror and asked, “Sami, how was your day? How was your first art class?”

From her car seat, Sami let out a sigh, and said with very little enthusiasm, “It was ok. We made flowers.”

Sami’s mom, replied, “Well that sounds good. You love to draw and color flowers.”

“Yeah, but we didn’t get to draw them,” Sami told her mother. “We got papers with flowers already drawn on them, and everyone had the same drawing, and when I started coloring mine with stripes on the petals and blue stems and orange leaves, Ms. Beth took my paper and told me I had to color the stems and leaves green and the petals with only one or two colors. Mine looked just like everyone else’s.”

“I really liked my colorful flowers,” Sami added through a pout.

“I’m really sorry to hear that,” said her mom. “You can draw all the flowers you want when we get home, and you can color them anyway that you want.”

Sami’s mood brightened a little, and she looked forward to making flowers her way when she got home.

One week later, Sami was in the hall outside of the art room. She wasn’t as excited as she was just a week ago, but she was hopeful that they would get to draw their own thing this time. Sami quickly found her seat, and Ms. Beth explained how they were going to draw cats this time. When Sami got her paper, she noticed it was blank, and her mood brightened as she thought, “Great! We get to draw our own cat!” Sami picked up her pencil and began drawing.

But then she heard Ms. Beth, say, “Now class just wait. Don’t start drawing yet. We’re going to do this together so that I can show you how to draw a cat.” Sami heard this, and her heart sank a little. She grabbed an eraser and erased the lines and shapes she had already started to draw that were starting to look like a sitting cat.

Ms. Beth stood in the front of the room near the board, and asked for everyone’s attention. She began by drawing a large oval on a piece of paper taped to the board and explained that everyone needed to do the same on their papers. Sami quickly drew her oval just like her teacher’s, and sat waiting as Ms. Beth walked around making sure that everyone had their oval drawn and helping those who were struggling. Sami sat patiently waiting and turning the eraser over and over in her hands. Finally, Ms. Beth walked up to the board and drew a circle for the head, and again explained that everyone needed to do the same. Sami drew her shape just as the teacher did and waited as Ms. Beth checked the other students.

With each new part of the cat, this process was repeated until everyone had a standing cat drawn in the middle of their paper. They had just a few minuted left to start coloring their cats, and though Sami really wanted to make her cat purple, she picked up brown crayon instead and began coloring her cat carefully.

When Sami’s mom picked her up from school that day, she seemed even quieter and more withdrawn then a week before. “Is everything ok, Sami? Didn’t you have a good day in art?”

“We drew cats,” Sami said with her chin in her chest.

“But you love to draw cats,” her mom replied.

“We had to draw the cat the way Ms. Beth drew hers, and I had to erase the one I started because I started to draw a cat sitting down, and Ms. Beth drew one that was standing up.” Sami huffed as she picked at her fingers. “She went step by step and I had to wait while she helped out a lot of the other kids. I could’ve drawn like fifty cats while I waited.”

“Well, you can draw as many cats as you want sitting or standing or running or playing when we get home,” said Sami’s mom in a cheery voice.

“Yeah. I guess so.” said Sami not feeling cheered up or like drawing any cats at all.

And so it went, week after week in Ms. Beth’s art class. Throughout the rest of the year, they did a variety of drawings and paintings, collages and sculptures. And though Sami liked using the different materials, Ms. Beth always told them exactly how to do everything. Though Sami always did her work and did it well, she was never excited to go to art class, and it didn’t seem like a magical place anymore.

The following year, Sami found herself in the hall outside of the art room as a first grader feeling nervous. She wasn’t nervous with excitement. She was nervous that things would be just like they were the previous year, and she was rather apprehensive as she made her way to her seat. The room seemed a bit different as she looked around, and as she sat down and turned her attention to the front of the room, she didn’t see Ms. Beth. Instead, a man introduced himself as Mr. James, and he explained that he was the new art teacher and that Ms. Beth had moved over the summer.

After explaining a few rules, Mr. James passed out paper and explained to the class that they could draw anything that they wanted. He told them that they could use any of the materials as he pointed to a bin in the middle of each table that had pencils, erasers, markers, and crayons. Sami looked at her paper and wearily turned it over but saw that the back was blank as well, and she raised her hand. “You mean we can draw anything that we want — anything at all?” she asked when Mr. James called on her.

“Yes. Anything that you want. You’re the artist and I want to see what you like to make as an artist,” he answered the girl, and told the class that they could begin.

Sami was a bit unsure, but picked up her pencil and tentatively started to draw a picture of the brave princess battling a lion. She kept looking around waiting for Mr. James to come over and to tell her to stop or that she couldn’t draw something or that she had to erase something, but when he did come over to the table, he didn’t tell her to stop. He only asked her to tell her about her drawing. So she told him in a timid voice, “I’m — I’m drawing a princess who is fighting a lion because the lion is trying to hurt people, and the princess is trying to stop it.”

Mr. James looked at her paper as she spoke, and then looked at her and said with a big smile, “Well, that sounds like a wonderful drawing. I can’t wait to see it when you’re all finished with it.”

Sami looked up at Mr. James a bit unsure, and said, “The thing is I don’t know how to draw a lion. I can’t remember what a lion looks like.” She looked down at her paper feeling a little ashamed, and asked, “How do you draw a lion?”

Mr. James stood up straight and rubbed his chin, and said, “You know what. I’m not sure how to draw a lion either. I’ve never really drawn one.”

“Oh!” said Sami a bit disappointed.

“But you know what?” said the teacher. “When I don’t know how to draw something, I like to look at whatever it is that I’m trying to draw. Now I don’t have an actual lion in the room that we can look at, but I do have books with pictures.”

Mr. James led Sami over to a bookshelf and took a book from a shelf labeled “Animals”, and handed it to Sami. She took it back to her seat, and Mr. James helped her look through it until they found several pages with pictures of lions. “Do you think looking at these pictures will help you draw a lion?”

Sami looked over all of the various pictures of lions from different points of view in different poses, and nodded her head as she muttered, “Yes.” She picked up her pencil and began drawing her lion. Sami felt excited as she finished drawing the princess and the lion and started to color it in. 

That afternoon from the back seat of the car, Sami hurriedly told her of the new art teacher before her mother could even ask her how art class had been. “And he let us draw anything that we wanted. And I drew the princess fighting a lion, and when I didn’t know how to draw a lion, Mr. James helped me by getting me a book with pictures of lions in it. And I colored it with whatever colors I wanted.” 

She bubbled over with creative confidence as she finished telling her mother about being an artist in art class, but she felt a little disappointed that she would have to wait an entire week before she could go back to that magical place where she could make the art that she was excited to make.