You were made on purpose.
Fine art Friday w4.
I sat at my table this week, I sat on my couch. For at least 2 hrs everyday, I put pencil to paper.
I haven’t been writing anything. I’ve been drawing.
One afternoon as I sat sketching at my table, the much larger round table next to me filled up with High School students. Together, they opened textbooks, calculus calculators and got to work.
What I witnessed and overheard was remarkable. The students collaborated, explained, stayed on point, and diligently worked through math I will never understand. One student in particular was clearly the Math ring leader. She understood, she explained, she lead. Then quietly out of the discussion I heard a voice speak out late in the solution. This student didn’t get the concept yet. He was falling behind, and he knew it.
It occurred to me that during the last 5 minutes of shared problem solving of Math, He had probably spent nearly all of it privately trying to come up with a creative way of explaining to his peers that He didn’t get the concept in the first place.
It’s what I would have done.
I wasn’t involved in the discussion or the group, but I heard the desperate creativity in the voice. How to explain the unexplainable. One is an accountant, the other, the cook.
The collective students immediately turned their attention back to the concept and explained the solution differently to the one that didn’t get it. Homework successful. Good kids. Teamwork.
Left Brian Right Brain. Sometimes Both. Sometimes in Starbucks. This is a photograph that I took the next day. The ghost of shared learning. Unity.
Honestly this is such a massive subject that I feel like pausing. This has everything to do with purpose.
This is a word that we’ve forgotten.
The brains and the math have purpose, the usage and the implementation do too. All of it.
Structure, composition, pattern. To much to distill, to much thinking. Back to the drawing.
The spring before last, a gorgeous tiny magnolia tree bloomed in my back yard. The unique placement of the tree means that it really doesn’t get any sun until later in the season. It’s a late bloomer. I photographed it. I called series Steel Magnolias and I will make those photographs available soon. I returned to the tree this spring, but the magic just wasn’t the same. The original photographs were just fine. So, I picked one of the compositions and used it as a model for the first pencil work that I have put any effort into in a long time. Art is art, and I started with a pencil long before I picked up anything else.
This was the result of a week spent not thinking and plenty of concentrating. Fine lines, blurry details, and sometimes not touching the paper at all.
Have wonderful weekend everyone.
-Nate
