Another Day in the Country
Putting it all together
© Another Day in the Country
A spring musical program happened a couple of Friday nights ago at Centre Elementary School.
The theme was all about rain. At the end of the program, everyone in the audience had a chance to be “rainmakers.”
Putting the audience to work, we really did sound like rain showers as we rubbed our palms together to imitate the sound of rain, clicking our tongues, snapping fingers, and even clapping thunder down.
It was wonderful to see all the kids dressed up and their parents watching the performance — if only we could get them to stop talking. The “them” being the adults, not the kids.
Even though the venue is a gymnasium, when you are at a concert, you are supposed to listen!
By the time you read this, the spring art show, which we call The Artful Eye, also will have happened.
We turned the smaller gym at the school into an art gallery (of sorts) since we assume most of the kids may not have been in an art gallery before.
In an art gallery you are encouraged to see. And, what a lot of things there were to see.
This is a much smaller gathering than at the school’s musical show, where every child is represented.
The Artful Eye show contained work that only a few (this year, it was 28 artists in Grades 3, 4, and 5) had done in something like 28 class periods over the course of the school year.
When I looked at the gym, now transformed into The Artful Eye gallery, I was amazed.
The artistic expression of these children, ages 8 to 11, with a little guidance from their teachers, is astonishing.
My hope, as one of the teachers, is that they retain some of this artistic stance for the rest of their lives.
“I am an artist,” they chant at the end of every class period, and whether they fully realize what a wonderful reality this is, it is so true.
Like artists everywhere, they sometimes are filled with wonder at what they’ve created.
“Did I actually do that?” “Wow!”
Then again, they might have had a vision to live up to, a hope of what it could be, and are so disappointed that it didn’t turn out.
“This time it didn’t work out,” I tell them, “but next time it can be beautiful. We just have to keep trying, and now is the time to practice. This is just paper that we’re playing with, and we can do it over.”
At some point in their lives, they will begin making decisions about weightier subjects than whether purple and orange go together.
Hopefully, as artists, they are learning to trust themselves.
The children’s art is judged by a real live artist. This year, it was Dennis Medina, curator at the Eisenhower Museum in Abilene for years before he retired.
It took all afternoon for Dennis to go through the art, which included pencil sketches, zentangles, ink designs, watercolors, acrylic paintings on canvas, collages, and even papier-mache.
Since most readers of Another Day in the Country didn’t get to attend our show, let me tell you what you missed.
First of all, drawing from life is a trick for adults, but these children are learning how to be confident that their hand will follow their eye.
It’s such fun to watch them learn to trust themselves. They drew dogs, flowers, trees, and vegetables from life — the real thing. This year, we even went so far as to try to draw feelings.
Our theme for the show this year was “Going on a Road Trip,” and it celebrated the real road trip that Horatio Jackson embarked on back in 1903, in an automobile — which was a new-fangled thing then — across the United States from San Francisco to New York City.
He did it on a $50 bet that he made in a bar and never collected.
He said he was sure a car could make it from California to New York in less than 90 days. Everyone else thought he was a fool — everyone except a 22-year-old bicycle racer he had hired to come along with him on the adventure.
Jackson didn’t even own a car when he made the bet. He bought a used Winton Touring Car that had no windshield, doors, trunk, or roof.
He also didn’t know how to drive. Sewell Crocker, the bike racer / mechanic, taught him how, and they were off on an adventure of a lifetime.
They made it safely to New York in 63 days without paved roads, maps, interstate highways, motels, regular gas stations, McDonalds, rest stops, or seatbelts.
If you take a road trip of your own to Washington someday and stop in at the Smithsonian, you can see the car that made the trip, right alongside the space capsule that took a man to the moon.
Meanwhile, we celebrate all things artistically adventurous in Kansas, on just another day in the country.