On a beautiful spring day I’m enjoying a rare moment of quiet while working on a book I hope will be ready by summer’s end. The subject is art and the text could be titled “How I Learned to Grasp Art After I Grew Up Since I had Zero Background,” except that won’t be the title. But it probably should be.
Wincenty Kasprzycki (1828)Okay, it wasn’t exactly a “zero background,” but I was raised with almost no exposure to art, unless you count paintings found in the iconic magazines that arrived weekly to our house back in the 1950s and 60s. And unless you count the black-and-white film strips about art that we were shown in school (back when public school kids did get basic training in the arts of music, folk dance, and visual art).
But whatever we learned at school, I never thought it transferred into real life. Plus, I didn’t think art was relevant to what I wanted to do (play the piano) or that it would be useful in my life. Not useful at all . . . with one exception (I’ll tell you about that situation in the first chapter of my book).
Spurring the creation of this book are dozens of questions put to me in recent years. So many young parents today graduated from public schools where Fine Arts programs had long ago been cut. Or, they were taught about art in such a cursory manner that little of it made an impression.
Besides that, many of today’s parents have been raised in homes without paintings, or decorative art, or even books about art. In some cases, their childhood was characterized by a paucity of good books (Captain Underpants does not count), a lack of instruction in music, and precious little exposure to the masterpieces of dance or theater. So for this generation of parents, it’s easy to see why the entire topic of the Fine Arts is off-putting.
Still, there is something about the tangible nature of visual art that causes parents to worry about not teaching it to their kids. Maybe it’s because they see glossy reproductions in expensive textbooks. Maybe it’s because they read headlines about paintings that fetch tens of millions of dollars at auction. Or, maybe there’s a lingering sense that a cultured, educated person needs to have an understanding of one of the cornerstones of our Western Culture.
Many of us working in the educational movement that encourages education informed by the real Liberal Arts (i.e., the Trivium and Quadrivium) have a habit of working together with an enthusiasm that approaches zeal. Each of us has areas of specialization (Latin, Greek, rhetoric, mathematics, modern languages, literature, science, the Fine Arts). Each of us has gone through a period in our adult lives when we reformed (re-formed) our thinking about education and reordered our pedagogical values. Each of us is on a mission to learn more ourselves as we carry forth the values that have stood our society in good stead for two millennia.
This kind of mission-driven learning never stops, once we set it in motion. It’s kind of like lawn care: if you mow, fertilize, trim, and cultivate a lawn, then you’ll grow a lot more greenery that will need to be mowed, fertilized, trimmed, and cultivated.
Dr. Chris Perrin, a favorite colleague of ours (we both participate at conferences in an always magical panel entitled “Classical Education Unhinged”) has been fond of saying that we, on the panel, are simply “less behind” than the audience members who have just undertaken the challenge of educating their kids in the time-honored traditions of classical learning.
No one will ever be able to read all of the Great Books. Or see all of the great plays staged. No one can listen to all of Bach’s or Beethoven’s music. (Well, you could, if you had enough weeks and months, but to what purpose?) Nor can we hop around the globe to take in all of the world’s artistic masterpieces.
What we can do is make a new circle of “friends” by inviting some of the great books we’ve always wanted to meet. We can set an extra place at our table to welcome our first opera or ballet. We can approach the theatrical tradition inaugurated by the Ancient Greeks as if we were jumping off into a gorgeous, cloud-filled sky. And we can approach visual art in much the same spirit.
My upcoming book will offer what you might call “alternative” ways of studying and experiencing art—ways that go beyond the frame and are likely to appeal to students not initially enamored by the idea of looking at something encased in a frame. Many a discipline has been entered into by the back door by following a twisty tunnel or grasping bit of sparkle dropped from a gilded wing.
One thing I believe firmly: The desire to learn opens our path. The key may be a random person who crosses our path. We might hear a solitary name or a simple quote that catches our imagination. Twisty threads of information hitherto languishing in isolation may snap together and create a kernel of deep understanding. No matter how it happens, we begin to grasp the things we missed and yearn to learn.
And so too it is with art. We begin. And our sails are filled with wind.