Center for Creative Arts is a magnet school, one of five in Chattanooga in different disciplines. I became one of 50 arts faculty in a school with 500 arts students, grades 6-12. In the five years that I was adjunct faculty at CCA, my wife Katherine and I were tapped to create curriculum for the Art Department. We and others worked within the budget to double the course offerings within the department. It was named one of the top five schools in the nation during our tenure. Two years after our departure, it was named the best of its kind.
I was teaching my Art Projects class, where students were free to define their own projects, and develop them with the instructor’s assistance. The students were free to find their own voice as artists first, while exploring new techniques and applying others they had mastered.
I had it all planned out. Everything was in order and in its place, so that we were free to focus on being creative, not looking for a pair of lost scissors. As a Designer I also knew that creativity happens when parameters are set clearly, and we are then allowed to work through them into revelations. Parameters are helpful at ruling out entire categories of creative dead ends.
I began this day by sharing a collection of videos of artists on fire with their art.
We started with the film Woodstock with Ritchie Havens performing “Freedom”, dancing himself right off of the stage in a trance. We followed that with Joe Cocker’s intense rendition of “With a Little Help from my Friends”. There was poetry, with Allen Ginsberg reading passionately, and Coleman Barks at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival reading his translations of the thirteenth century Sufi mystic, Jal al’adin Rumi.
We topped it off with the passion and drama of Flamenco dance from Spain, and then heart-rending a’capella Gypsy singing.
In Tennessee, this was a revelation for many. But more than that, it was an open door to creating from the heart. When the films stopped, the students were free to go to it, surrounded by mediums from ink to acrylic. It was a release through fire.
There were kids working on the floor, on the walls, dancing and drawing, singing and painting.
It was a kind of mayhem. A creative chaos. A controlled fall, like steering a parachute, or fainting into waiting arms.
As Mickey Hart’s Planet Drum played, and the rareified colors and scenes of Latcho Drom swirled by on video, students were a whirl about me in every direction, and I found myself entranced, slipping into my own epiphany.
I realized that chaos can be good, that new combinations can occur, new associations can be made, new sensibility can take root and flourish where the established barriers are laid down.
No children were harmed in the making of this art, no social revolutions were inspired, but personal ones were. Students who had been shy and quiet all year were suddenly at ease with letting go because no one else would notice them in that bubbling environment. The room survived in tact. No one tried to tunnel out to freedom.
There were other days with the whole class painting a twenty five foot Jackson Pollock splatter painting canvas. Brushes everywhere from sables to a street-sweeper broom. Or to drawing with coffee and chocolate. From three minute gestural figure drawings to sketching dancers in watercolor in the ballet studio. No one told them that this was difficult, even for experienced artists. They had become truly creative and innovative, and fearless.
They had been given permission to be themselves.
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All the while, my students were teaching me, healing me, reclaiming my heart and soul one pencil line, one ink splatter, one scumbled stroke at a time.
I had crossed the threshold with them into letting go.
Between classes I began to work in that space with free form paintings. I rearranged the room to accomodate twenty drawings at once, as I moved from paper to paper around the space. I was able to focus deeply and draw on my heart with work I call Energy Drawings. It remains a document of some of my best work.
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There is always time to open to possibilities. There is opportunity every day to write another page, to sketch another moment, to turn breath into beauty.
Snow on Water touches so many people who are seeking their own renewal. I hear from artists and designers who see here that there is Art after Work. And hope for real meaning in taking art and design beyond commerce toward reclaiming their heart.
I wish you all your own epiphany. May it start today with your heart work.
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