A Painter's Musings on the Visual World

Winslow Homer went to Virginia during the Civil War as an illustrator for Harper’s and was moved by the plight of slaves. He painted “Sunday Morning in Virginia” to portray a family engaged in reading the Bible, one of the few books available to slaves. It showed the children’s thirst for knowledge, learning reading from their mother. In the years leading up to the Civil War, teaching slaves to read was against the law in most southern states because reading “has a tendency to excite dis-satisfaction in their minds, and to produce insurrection and rebellion.” Breaking the law was punishable by fines and imprisonment for the teachers and much worse for the slaves. The simple idea of “Each One Teach One” came about to pass on literacy without endangering those who practiced it. 

I began to think about Each One Teach One in the realm of our public education.  I am a former frustrated art teacher who realized what I was up against both in numbers and sentiment when I taught elementary school art. The year I retired was the year they shortened my art periods to 30 minutes back to back and increased my weekly teaching load from 600 to almost 900 students. Art teachers can cite data about critical thinking skills improving standardized test scores until they are blue in the face.  The reality is in most elementary programs, art teachers exist to give the classroom teacher a break period. Yet my district was fortunate in that there actually was an art program at all. 

As artists we wonder why the public has so little knowledge of art but doing something to change that seems to be beyond our scope. Most public school students will have art, if they have it at all, for 40 minutes a week until grade 6 and that will be the last time they see it. If you assume that half that art time is distribution and clean up, that is about the equivalent of two weeks of art education in a lifetime for most of our country.

Fortunately for me there was a wonderful woman in my small hometown that gave of her time at a local art center. It ran on a shoestring and charged my already strapped parents very little. She was not a famous artist but she ended my art illiteracy by giving me oil paints at age ten.  Thank you, Arlene Knecht – I will never forget you. You made me want to be you when I became a teacher, but that was just not possible in the public school.

"Time with Dad"   Oil,  Jane Chapin

In the small town where I live in New Mexico, the options are slim to none – which of course is why I started thinking of that phrase again. There are programs for reading literacy and there is also a big current push for math and science but I have never seen a real effort for children’s art. In all the duties our public schools are now charged with, art drops further and further down the list.

Is it possible for us as artists to do something selfless for the next generations? What would be the effect if we each gave a couple of hours a week for those students who are really interested? Unlike other current movements in art, this is not one promising us notoriety or increased sales. And we cannot say to students – “Hey if you do this, you will get a financial reward, a great job or a scholarship.” There is just no way to quantify critical thinking or increasing analytical skills. We might be able to say “If you do this you will be surprised at your ability and maybe get a good feeling.” And what if those students could not wait to take that achievement home and teach their younger sibling how they did it? I may live in the perfect small town to try such a crazy idea.

Elementary School Art Show, 2003

Each year that I taught art in that elementary school, we had an art show.  Every student of every ability and grade had one work created during the year that went into that show. It filled the library and the last week of classes, every art period toured the show. It was always the best-behaved class of the year - they were astonished at what they had done and uncharacteristically reverent about looking at a collection of all their schoolmates – it was their museum show. Mounting, labeling and displaying 900 artworks was a crazy idea, a ridiculous amount of work to put together and each year I could not wait to do it. To this day I miss seeing an accomplished look on a child's face.