I feel best when I block out everything except the thing directly in front of me. I think this is true of many people.

For me, it has happened at places like these: at the dinner table facing loved ones; in the grass (barefoot or with dirty hands); at my sewing machine alone; or with drawing materials in hand. This concentration is a form of mindfulness, and along with imagination, it’s something I want to help my students to practice. Mindfulness means being fully in the present moment, and I think that today, when screens give us a portal to anywhere but our own tangible environment, it’s harder than ever to achieve. Something more alluring might always be happening elsewhere.

In some experiences, external rules or sheer demand bring about mindfulness- that is, depth of attention and sustained engagement- without conscious effort. A person playing a sport that she loves finds it easy to be mindful about where the ball is. But in daily life, how do we stay mindful in every moment, giving our care to what is right there in front of us? How do you do this? 

Art-making is a form of mindfulness, but until the past couple of years I didn’t realize how meditative and focusing it can be. I return again and again to this phrase from an author I love:

“Merely looking at the world around us is immensely different from seeing it . . . Although many of us, under the ceaseless bombardment of photographic and electronic imagery that we experience daily, have lost that gift of seeing, we can learn it anew, and learn to retrieve again and again the act of seeing things for the first time, each time we look at them . . . Once we start to draw, all of a sudden we begin to see again.” -Frederick Franck

It’s true! Franck is speaking of drawing particularly but the same can be said of other arts, such as writing- especially writing poetry. The movement of a hand in the air, the stoop of a shoulder, patterns of light and shadow on a wall, the way a leaf curls. The simplest things, once overlooked, are all of a sudden important and I feel that they are worthy of immense attention. When this happens, I feel a joy I can’t contain.

I want all of my students to experience this. When they do, it is a beautiful thing! I often present lessons that include a component about close observation and interpretation of objects in front of them, or a photo if necessary. My intent is to have them dwell on it and produce their own composition that shows that they were really looking at the subject and trying to capture it, not simply reduce it to a cartoonish rendering. One of the best, and most classic, assignments to produce this experience is the still life. 

I always bring in fruits and vegetables in a variety of colors. We talk about how to foreshorten, overlap, shade, and highlight. I ask them what color an apple is (“red”, I always hear, and “or sometimes green”) and then I hold up an apple and ask them what colors they actually see…and it is red to pink to yellow to green and sometimes they get excited and venture words like ‘blush’ and ‘crimson’. I tell them to really, really look at the fruit and vases at their tables and see how they’re arranged, and then try to capture it on paper as they see it- and to make their fruit look as juicy as possible! For the student whose composition is pictured above, I saw his mindfulness in the gradations of tint on the glass bottle, in the clustering of grapes, and the highlights on all his subjects. 

Sometimes mindfulness in drawing doesn’t result in a polished composition, but it’s no less meaningful. We did a unit on line using photos of bare trees, and I was so pleased at the way this student really saw the overlapping branches in her specific tree and patiently worked to capture their tangled quality:

I like this tree so much because it is so singular and wild and so unlike the plain simplified ones that children often draw from their mental idea of a tree. Even harder than a tree, though, I think the hardest subject to draw from observation without reverting to mental stereotypes is the human face. I tried to shake up the students’ notions of how to draw a face this year by making the unit on portraiture all about expression. We looked at several of Norman Rockwell’s paintings (I don’t care what the art establishment says, Norman Rockwell is wonderful; no other artist I’ve found inspires such total delight and hilarity in my students) and talked about how we can read emotion through expression. We speculated about the meaning of some of Rockwell’s paintings, and how the expressions on the faces helped to tell a story and show personality. Then, I told them they would paint a self-portrait and that I wanted it to show their personality. I took their pictures while they made an expression. Below is my favorite self-portrait, from one of my first graders. 

In the interests of privacy I won’t post his photo. But the amazing thing is that this perfectly captures the essence of the expression he had! Even better is the way he exaggerated it. His mouth was pursed to one side, one eye was squinted, and he looked off to the side in a very quizzical and comical fashion. 

I’ve gone on about this long enough! But I would like to know if any of you reading this can recall art experiences or other activities in which you had a realization that it was totally capturing your attention and engagement in a way that was unusual, and maybe even influential to you.

Much has happened since my last post, in June. Mainly, we have traveled. We spent a lot of time in the mountains, especially in Montana. I won’t overload this post with tons of photos, but I have to include a couple.

It was sublime.

I wish everyone who loves the land could visit Montana. Except, then, it wouldn’t be the pristine and remote place it is. Montana has a wild, sweet and strange quality about it, but it is hard to sum up. Valleys like bowls scooped out between mountains with green rippling sides. Stark cliffs with a thousand faces. Jewel-bottomed lakes. These are my feet at the place that has long been my favorite, since childhood summers spent here: Flathead Lake. When I think of Montana, it’s not just mountains that come to mind, but sunlight and the clearest, coldest water- water that takes away your breath with cold and makes you gasp with joy.

Lake St. Mary at Glacier. I wanted to stay.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
     It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
     It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
     And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
     And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
     There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
     Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs –
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
     World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins