MY THREE STUDENTS

A funny thing happened in June 2007, just as my wife and I were about to celebrate our 10th anniversary. Even though I had never taught art in my life, and was fully self-employed as a writer and designer (in addition to painting the sunrise and sunset every day, of course), within two days of each other two sets of parents asked me if I would teach art to their kids – three children in all. The two families did not know each other. Laura and I have never wanted children, but the strangest aspect was that all of the prospective students were 10 years old (including a pair of fraternal twins).

I said yes, even though I knew that teaching is one of the most difficult of jobs, and particularly for me, as I had already proven when I taught writing at UVa’s Darden Graduate School of Business Administration. I managed to do well at Darden, but almost everything for that course required my very deliberate effort.

Maybe teaching art to 10-year-olds would be easier.

Ha!

I don’t think it would have mattered much whether or not the kids were very bright or talented, but teaching three very bright and talented children was a challenge.

Truly, I’m not much of a teacher in the sense of being an instructor who conveys information or teaches a set of skills in a systematic way. I am better as a mentor and facilitator, a role I’ve assumed many times with writing and design clients. Luckily for me, to some extent with these kids all I had to do was wind them up and watch them go. 

I’ll describe them individually as artists on their respective pages, but one thing they have in common – and I think this is a compliment to their parents – is a matter-of-fact confidence in their own instincts and ideas that never failed to impress me. They might sometimes insist that they absolutely could not possibly do this or that specific technical thing or handle a certain subject, but that’s beside the point. When it came time to express themselves, they expressed themselves. Which is how I got to know them, I think, really well.

They are three of the most wonderful people I’ve met in my life, and I’ve set up these pages as my tribute to them. 

Lakshmi, Mohan, Willa, thank you.

Saturday
May162009

Mohan Danis (Age 10) – “New York City”

Mohan Danis. New York City. Pencil on paper, 5.5 x 7.75.I never really quite got over this drawing, one of the first things I ever saw from Mohan. It wasn’t just the wild windows and building shapes and names, and the made-up phone number, or the corner of a sandwich in the sign for the restaurant. Or the wonderfully cratered moon, or the height of the buildings indicated by their reaching through the clouds. Nor was it the apparatus atop the building on the right, which in many later drawings Mohan expanded into a whole series of gizmos, new ways of generating power and new media of communication.

No, more than all of this it was Mohan’s ability to express in such a small area and with so few objects the feeling of the specific space, the peculiar density of New York City. I recognized it immediately – after all, I lived there.

But Mohan? He’s never been there!