River Journeys Podcast

Part One ***ENERGY UNBRIDLED

Every child is an artist. The challenge is to remain an artist when you grow up. —Pablo Picasso

Draw. Decorate. Design. All were outside my sturdy middle-class school experience. In a curriculum where memorization and outlining were daily companions, art was an infrequent visitor… and never for a “serious” student. I was a serious student.

The Space Age began October 4, 1957, when the USSR launched Sputnik 1, the first Earth-orbiting satellite. In case we weren’t intimidated enough, that same year Soviets also tested the first ICBM, a self-propelled unmanned missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads. The country riveted its attention on the “space race”… a race that focused schools on “important subjects” — science, math, civics. There was little room for art. Americans were busy building concrete bomb shelters in their backyards while peering skyward, positive missiles would be raining down any minute. My classmate, Karen, had the nicest bunker in the city. We all wanted to be her friend. Lillian J. Rice Elementary School, where I began fifth grade that year, sits in the southwest corner of Chula Vista, then a sleepy town eight miles north of the Mexican border. Built in 1938, it had three single-story wings of self-contained classrooms clustered like dominoes at right angles to one another. At the far edge of the property squatted two rectangular portables, the same dusty color as the playground. On the first day of school, our new teacher, a slight, timid man who wore a dark wool suit that day and every day after (despite the hot Southern California fall weather), couldn’t get the noise level below deafening. As 3 o’clock approached, he made an announcement.

We were curious. The room fell silent. It is the singular quiet moment I recall. Longer recess? No homework? The suit should have tipped us off. The quiet disconcerted him. Twisting his hands like someone demonstrating the best way to use hand sanitizer, he told us art and music would be our “reward” at the end of each week. Why? Because we were “stuck” in one of the dilapidated temporary classrooms. Murmurs began to percolate as he rushed on. He explained he would bring symphonic music to play on the record player perched atop the dented gray file cabinet behind his desk. The clincher: while we listened, we could draw. We were unimpressed. We didn’t feel “stuck.” We liked our classroom. We liked being away from the “little kids.” We liked the playground right outside the door. We didn’t know what symphonies were and weren’t interested in finding out.

My classmate, Karen, had the nicest bunker in the city. We all wanted to be her friend.

Every Friday, Mr. Chang arrived, a large black vinyl record in a paper jacket tucked under his arm. Every Friday, chaos ensued. The boys drew insulting pictures on their construction paper, then tore them into tiny pieces for spit wad wars. The girls drew hearts and played “hangman.” Soon after Sputnik, art and music disappeared. By Christmas, the teacher disappeared as well after an unfortunate incident. He somehow ended up stuck in the ball box while we snaked around the room in a jerky conga line in time with a Beethoven overture. Art education was over.

I threw myself into a tracked curriculum dominated by words… lab manuals, grammar tomes, foreign language workbooks, anthologies. Seven years later, I found myself a freshman at Whittier College. Studying in the library one hot, smoggy afternoon, surrounded by piles of books and feeling the world was a huge, fragmented set of competing ideas, I longed to look at something besides lines of text. The bookstore was selling tiny books of famous art prints on a table by the checkout stand — 25 cents apiece. Without much thought, I bought one. Rummaging through my book bag, I plucked it out. On the cover, a red violin floated over the title: “Raoul Dufy—Music.”

Flipping through the 4-inch prints, a stray thought pushed toward the surface like a swimmer coming up from a deep dive. I realized both my education and my heart had been missing something. Something important. Artists and craftsmen look for the same unity beneath life’s disconcerting rumblings as do philosophers and writers. Different mediums. Similar goals.

I went back to the bookstore and bought one copy of every pamphlet on the table. I stood them side-by-side around the wide library carrel desktop like baseball players looking from the dugout toward the playing field. When I tired of unraveling philosophical arguments or slogging through Randall’s Making of the Modern Mind, the abstruse required text for the college’s two-year History of Western Civilization course, I would disappear into one of the miniature pictures. A door cracked open. I wandered through some of the world’s great paintings and handicrafts. Pausing often to study some captivating detail, I recognized although the works were wildly different, they had one thing in common. Artists work in multiple mediums — paint, marble, porcelain, wood, clay, fibers, photography, found objects, and more — because there are no words for what they want to convey. I spent two years at Whittier. The little art books were part of everyday. Towards the end of E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View, the heroine, Lucy, expresses her debt to old Mr. Emerson. “It was as if he had made her see the whole of everything at once.” I know now it is impossible to see the whole of even any one picture at once, let alone everything. But there was a single moment, long ago in the old wooden college library, where turning my eyes from the book before me to the art around me, I sensed for an instant that perhaps, just perhaps, everything might form a whole, at the edge of awareness in a place we seldom go. These days, I never look for missiles in the sky. I look instead at lights and shadows overhead, underfoot, all around. I look at my paint palette too. The colors start out separated, lined up in anticipation of some project. Soon the palette is messy — colors oozing into one another, unexpected different hues percolating out. More interesting. More exuberant. Wholeness. Waiting to be found. Once more.

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“To create a memorable design, you need to start with a thought that is worth remembering.”

—Thomas Manss

The small box, with its geometric inlaid light and dark pattern, was a gift from my father after one of his Navy deployments. When he pulled it from his duffel bag, I tried to hide my disappointment. It looked like a decorated wooden rectangle. I had been hoping for a Japanese doll, or maybe a jewelry box. “What could it be?” I wondered.

“It opens,” he smiled. “It’s a puzzle. See if you can solve it.”

After several days and many broad hints from Dad, I figured out by pushing and pulling the delicate wood design that the box unfolded to reveal a tiny drawer. It became the destination for treasures — delicate seashells, colored stones, jaunty acorn caps, shiny coins retrieved from couch cushions.

I grew older. The world grew more complicated, more strident, harder to understand. The box became a way of thinking about the challenges we all face on the other side of childhood—homemaking, parenting, shaping time beyond the ring of school bells. Most of my answers came from books. But not all of them.

Facing those challenges was like unlocking the box: frustrating, no instructions provided. Through a process of trial and error — touching, shaking, looking from different angles — I found the secret lever. One step led to the next. The box grew bigger. More appealing. More beautiful than its surface design suggested.

Life is the same. There are those who don’t consider crafts and porcelain painting art — dismissed as the product of technicians or “mere” illustrators. They are art — art for everyone, not just the wealthy or intellectual elite. Society thinks art needs intermediaries. It isn’t important if the public understands it. Even worse if they like it. Oscar Wilde captured the idea: “Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.”

My adventures with crafts and painting led me to an insight I might have otherwise missed. There are all kinds of stories to tell. Most use words, but some do not. The tools I chose and the projects woven through the decades have been simple ones. But in their ordinariness something happened. The dilemmas, disappointments, discoveries and often, the delights that have surprised me, have been easier to understand, as ideas that belonged to the arts became ideas for living.

Most of my answers came from books. But not all of them.

Beginning a craft project or opening my paint box feels like entering C.S. Lewis’s magic wardrobe. Other worlds appear. They are colorful places, teeming with possibilities. They are places where choices often lead to unanticipated outcomes — sometimes worse, more often better.

Alvin Toffler observed in “The Third Wave” that to create a fulfilling emotional life and sane emerging civilization for tomorrow, people need three basic requirements: community, structure and meaning. I disagree. It isn’t only the future that needs those things. We have always needed ways to transform life from a box with no exit, to a place where dreams and discoveries make living a deeper, richer, wider journey.

I was an unsuitable candidate for the kingdoms that make up art and design. Yet with no formal training at the outset, and no apparent aptitude, the time I have spent “thinking” with my hands — painting, printing, creating from scraps and castoffs — have sent shafts of light across countless murky hours.

Set against the backdrop of my decisions to explore old-fashioned crafts, and later, porcelain painting, the essays here are a tribute to my journey with art — its influence and its unexpected lessons.

There are lots of ways to open a box. Art is one.

River Journeys is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.