Wednesday is Art. My favourite day. Or used to be until the cornflowers.
Ten cornflowers in a jar. I loved them. Burning blue. Impatient to be begin
I scoured my paintbox. Cobalt. Azure and Prussian Blue. I mixed them well,
and laid them on my page, and saw the flowers bloom beneath my brush.
I showed my friend. “Dad grows these in our garden. Mum's special flower,
The colour of her eyes.” The teacher pounced. “Time to talk? No need to work?
Perhaps you'll show us what you've done?” She held my painting to the class,
While I sat proudly by. But then, “Now children look at this,” she said,
“And learn how NOT to paint. Jenny calls them flowers. But what do we see?
Just ten green sticks in a crooked jar, and ten awful blobs of horrible blue.”
Wednesday is always Art. It was my favourite day,
But now, if I can manage it, I try to stay away.

Going through my son's book, as I read these lines by Jenny Craig, I was transported back to a time when I was a young student, about five or six years of age, small in size but big on dreams. I imagined myself being a famous painter, an accomplished pianist, a brilliant ballet/kathak dancer, a world-class singer, a legendary astronaut, ....! The list was endless. One of the things I fancied the most was drawing and painting. I would look forward to my art class. I would arrange my art notebook, crayons and paint-box neatly in my bag, and always left it there, just in case my teacher decided to have an impromptu art lesson! But soon, I lost interest in the class and I slowly, unconsciously, let go of my dream to be a famous artist.
As I look back, what I recollect is the fact that there were so many set rules for the class. Right from choosing the object or model that we had to draw, the way it had to be drawn, the colours we had to use, the size and shape it had to be, the kind of pencil, brush, paints we had to use, every little thing was pre-decided by the teacher. We just had to copy what was on the blackboard or on the teacher's desk, within the given parameters. The sun had to be a certain shade of orange or yellow (usually not the ones I visualized!), the trees, the river, the hut, the mountains, the birds, everything had to look the same as everybody else's! Wow! Isn't that incredible! We could make such brilliant reproductions of our teacher's artwork, we were almost an art factory! And we actually got marked on our fine reproductions, and received lots of praise from our respective parents and relatives!
And that is the day, art, creativity, imagination, emotion, individual thinking and expression, all died a sad death. And there was none the wiser for it, because we were all living up to our parents' and teachers' artistic image of us. It has been said so many times, more than one can remember, that when “The Scenery” of all the children in a class looks exactly the same, creativity is dead! Drawing the unique shape of an apple, in all its wondrous shades of green or red, as it's ripeness and juiciness almost jumps out of the page at us, NO, It's just not Allowed! Anyway, wasn't it just a hobby class, something we had to fit in among the more important language, math and science classes? Who needs great artists, we should only be great doctors, engineers, scientists, accountants, .... That list is also endless!
But those were the days, when we were very young, early in our lives, bursting with creative ideas, longing to express ourselves, it was then that we learned that we could and should not be thinking people. We have to reproduce others' thoughts, revisit others' places of creativity, re-walk the paths trodden by many before us, and re-create, re-assemble and re-organize others' creativity and originality into the new package of non-thinking, non-creative, unoriginal, anonymous people, that is us. We have been very successful,too, in becoming these individuals without any individuality!
The question now that I want to raise is, “Aren't we doing the same to our children?” What, then, does the future look like? I leave you with this food for thought.
Love and God bless.