believing is seeing

I am planning to return to school next year to get a Masters Degree in Art Education.

Everyone knows that those who can't do, teach; so why would I want to teach others to make art? Am I giving up, admitting I don't have "it"? Maybe, you judgemental pigsnout. But maybe not. This "they" who tells us that teaching others is an admission of inability have perhaps never heard that most of the so-called "great" artists of the past taught on the side - and some of them even liked it (Gauguin was known to pull a revolver on people who mixed colors too much - what's not to love about that?).

Besides, while I may be an artist, I am also a person, which means my interests are more varied than they ought to be. I like to read, write poetry (check it out! new poems in the poetry section! come one, come all!), play the occasional soccer or tennis match, toodle around with my motorcycle, and sing loudly in the shower. Besides, teaching is HARD, and beyond just loving the feeling of inspiring others to greatness, I'm a sucker for a challenge. What, you might ask, is so challenging about teaching art?

Well, to teach someone to draw, you have to first teach them to see. To teach them to see, to really SEE, you have to convince them to want to see. To teach someone to want to see, you have to make them believe that what they currently do with their eyes is a sort of selective blindness, brought about by the mind's inability to process all the information it receives, which is why it cheats, boxing objects under general headings, like "tree" and "chair" and forgetting to notice the carved initials, or the ornate painting of a chinese dragon. Once you've convinced them of this, you have to convince them that it is worthwhile, sometimes (if only for a few minutes), to fight back the boxing urge and actually LOOK.

This is the hard part, because at this point you have to get all philosophical and convince people that the forms of the world are real enough to matter enough that you might want to bother to spend an hour or more actually looking at them. In our postmodern age, this is a hard task indeed, so often you have to start by tricking them with magic. You tell them that there is a power in drawing, and that eventually they'll be able to take up a pencil and steal a person's soul.

Another tack you can try is to convince people that they are themselves magic and that the only way to release that magic is to stop their mind from working in the normal, boring, non-magical way in which they've trained it. You do this in rationalistic terms, though, because you (the teacher) are fighting a fixed battle against everything else they're being told by all their other teachers - television, movies, parents, the educational system - and so you have to claw tooth-and-nail, gouging eyes if necessary and using whatever sneaky, underhanded method you can.

Once you do this, once you get your way and they believe that they are blind, then their eyes are opened. Believing is seeing, in a sense, so they can begin to notice things as they really are.

What is all this worth?

I don't know.

Perhaps in the future, when they're confronted with something that some primal instinct tells them is not exactly right, then they'll be able to shut down for a second that boxing, reactionary thought pattern and take a moment to evaluate what it is they're actually seeing. They will look for truth behind depicted reality. They will search for meaning in the madness.

They may not find it (it is, I think, unlikely that they will). But something will have changed, and in some small way they may find themselves less the victims of their slavish nature, which could (a teacher can dream, can't he?) allow them the hope necessary to give them the determination enact some sort of change.

Also, they'll be able to draw pretty pictures of ducks for their aunt.