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On the question of how I am qualified to teach art …


By trade I am a lawyer. Many lawyers do have a passion besides their original profession though, I happen to have three, if you count my love for children in general and my own children in particular as one. The other two are writing and art. I mention this because you will surely want to know how I am qualified to write on a subject that is a bit out of the way of my original expertise. My grandmother used to say I have been born with a brush in one and in pen in my other hand – and as far as I can remember I have been scribbling and drawing on every appropriate surface – and some less suited. That I came to study law is strange, all things considered, but I guess I wanted to try out if I could succeed at something else, something real. I graduated with two law degrees and, even though I actually (and I should add: eventually) became a practicing lawyer – even before starting to practice law I came straight back to art.
I do believe though that art is not an esoteric, isolated endeavor that people sometimes take it to be. Artists are well advised to take notice of their world and have an understanding of it that transcends the visual. Beuys said that every person is indeed an artist. He demanded that every sales person, dental hygienist, physician, scientist, philosopher, electrician … (fill in your profession) be first trained in art. The reverse holds true too. Every artist is part of a tangible social reality. The training to become a lawyer might in the end not be either so far from or so detrimental to artistic creation as it might seem at first.
I do love children – and I do remember quite vividly to have been one myself. Believe me as a first hand witness and as someone who still draws and paints, saws and glues every day: There is no time like childhood to experience the joy of art. I had the good luck to be partly raised by a grandmother who had the wisdom of an older generation to pretty much let me do whatever I thought entertaining if I obeyed some general ideas of etiquette that were easy enough to memorize. I was allowed to use any tool from the tool shed or the kitchen. Nothing was childproof or child-size, I had to use them as they were. I was also allowed to make generous use of old newspapers and magazines, of the newsprint paper that my grandfather, who was publisher of a local newspaper, brought home, and of every piece of metal, screw, paper, feather, stone or glass shard that I loved to pick up during our long walks. It never occurred to my grandparents that it was their responsibility to prevent me from injuring myself (and cutting , scraping and bruising myself while working with knives, scissors and hammers seemed part of my job description as “child”). I don’t know whether they ever articulated it that instead they trusted me to take care of myself that but it surely was the result of their laissez-faire regime.
I brought everything I found home and assembled it very much the way every child will when you do not interfere. I do not know where our desire to “make” things has its origin; I do know that we already possess it as children, together with an instinct of how things fit together. If children are not allowed to roam as freely as I was they will still build markers from pebbles and stones, they will still use sticks to draw in sand, build strange, improvised gardens in the mud, decorate prefabricated play structures with ritual signs when the occasion (boredom paired with freedom) presents itself.
To be creative is a basic desire of humans, all humans. It is a genuine expression of who we are even before we are defined by our social and economic circumstances. To teach a child to be creative therefore seems to me an elusive act. I look at children with a sense of awe, they are still there, right at the origin, and all I do as a teacher is to take them on the long walk I took as a child with my grandparents allowing my students their own discoveries and the freedom to collect at will what responds to their unique desire to create this world new according to their own vision as every artist will.
If we’d create more protective spaces for our children, spaces in which they could grow according to their own needs, we could cut back on many extracurricular activities. The challenge is right out there and the artist that lives in every one of us but is acutely alive in our children is ready to meet whatever form that challenge in their very own live might take.
To come back to the question of my own expertise: I do believe with visionary clarity that it is not my expertise and training/education that is relevant. It is my willingness to acknowledge, respect and celebrate children as the artists they are. I do believe that art is not a matter of paper and ink, of perspective and shading, I do believe though art techniques can be taught art cannot, no more than breathing, walking, seeing. It is something that happens when things go right or when you have to make them come out right. Art is the freedom to choose your own words. Art is the freedom to follow your own voices. Art is life.

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Small Rabbit Bookstore


After school I went to the town library. The sky was bright grey and diffusely glaring as if the sun was about to break through. The bare branches of the late November trees were once again settled with crows who moved lazily and could be mistaken for dark leaves. Shivering in the crisp air, I wrapped my double helix hand-knitted scarf twice around my neck (there was enough material to go around four times and still leave the ends falling over my shoulders), picked up speed and felt the pompom of my matching hat bouncing rhythmically with my steps. The feeling of the pompom reassured me as if childhood was still a possibility to be considered in this strange game I had taken to playing lately.

Until the event of the blockbuster bookstore I have always loved any kind of book store or library, and I had quickly found an appreciation for the smallish library in Summerville (not at least due to pretty and efficient Ms. Clarice) and loved the “Small Rabbit Bookstore” in town, too. The owner of the “Small Rabbit” was a nervous, wiry guy who looked very much like a hare. He rarely talked, never left his corner behind the register, and always wore a hat, even on hot summer days.

The store was nothing much compared the Strand Bookstore on Broadway we used visit too frequently when we still lived in the city, or the Crawford’s Childrens’ Book Store on Madison and 93rd Street, and neither did the Summerville Memorial Library compare to the New York Public library city branch we used to go to every Monday after school. My mother had refined the skill of dragging us, my sister still riding on her hip, through the whole library following without doubt a well planned route, while filling a tote with amazing speed: art books, do-it-yourself-guides for plumbing, mathematical treatises, and any selection of dusty volumes on obscure topics. Feeling out the frail limits our patience predictably imposed on her, she would finally settle down in the kids’ section and spent the next two hours finding treasures for us, reading with us and following my sister’s lead crawling through the labyrinth of shelves.

Sometimes I longed to be back in New York, in our cramped walk-up apartment, sharing a bed-room with my little sister. I also longed to be a mere child a little longer, relying on my mother’s ingenuity to entertain and educate me – often by the same idea. I still loved sitting in her kitchen in the afternoon or at night, talking with her or listening to her monologues on H+, the idea of transhumanism, or her doubt concerning the accepted theory of Vincent van Gogh’s suicide.

I also still enjoyed occasionally joining her on weekends for trips or excursions to the city – but things were different than they used to be. Not as simple. It was understood now that I could say no, that I was allowed to choose my own entertainment. My mother still took my sister Phoebe along on every one of her quests whether Phoebe wanted to or not – but I often decided to stay at home even though it made me feel uncannily excluded.<a

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Tessalation

In the meantime I stood by and just waited, too impatient to take care of my weekly list of reading and also afraid to let the old man out of sight. My head still throbbed lightly and the smell of the new scrubby grey floor tiles did not help to improve it. I concentrated on the unusual pattern of the otherwise ordinary floor covering. The tiles were light and dark grey and laid out in an unexpectedly complex pattern. Areas can be filled completely and symmetrically with tiles of 3, 4 and 6 sides, but it was long believed that it was impossible to fill an area with 5-fold symmetry though Kepler played with the idea. I knew this because my mother loved the work of M.C. Escher who was intrigued my mathematic patterns and used them in his illustrations. It did perplex me that the library floor tiles were cut out of so called kite and dart shapes which actually do allow a surface to be completely tiled in an asymmetrical, non-repeating manner in five-fold symmetry with just two shapes based on phi. As a result the tessellation of the dense felt tiles in the lobby made it impossible to arrange my thoughts according to the floor pattern – a technique I had used since childhood to soothe anxiety.

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Einstein’s delusion

“A human being is a part of a whole, called by us ‘universe’, a part limited in time and space.

He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest… a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.

This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” Einstein

of course that task one day is easily accomplished by submitting to whichever death comes our way. in the meantime moments of compassionate awareness on a human, earth bound scale will suffice and procure a less chilling enjoyment. all living creatures. yes. but there is compassion also through our specified affections. the singular touch. the loving appreciation to the detail of a restricted vision creates the sought after connection,proves to be a gate, alas, mostly without awareness.

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Circus Utopia Art Press reads: Thomas Moore

Circus Utopia reads Thomas Moore
It seems to me that where private properties exist, where all men measure all things in relation to money, it is hardly possible to establish, in public affairs, a regime at once just and prosperous, unless you esteem it just that the best things belong to the worst persons, or unless you judge it well that all goods be shared among the fewest people who even then are not entirely satisfied, whilst all others are in the direst poverty. This is why I reflect upon the Constitution of the Utopians, so wise, so morally irreproachable, among whom with the fewest possible laws all is regulated for the good of all, in such a way that merit is rewarded; and that, in a sharing from which no one is excluded, everyone has nonetheless a large part.

Thomas Moore
Circus Utopia Art Moments

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night watches

acrylic and mixed media on poster board, 2011

That night I kept watch. My journal lay open on my desk but I mainly just looked at the small breathing forms of the hatchlings. The rest of the aquatic doodle bugs continued their dance. I had switched off all but a small desk light, barely enough to illuminate the surface of my workplace. When I looked up the darkness in front of my window seemed impenetrable for a moment until my eyes adjusted to the night. The rook was still perched on a high branch of the acorn, solemnly keeping watch with me. I knew that my sister was probably asleep by now but that my mother would be painting until the early hours.
Keeping watch. It was strange to be quiet, just watching. It occurred to me that most of the time we are actively doing something, except for the few moments when we are waiting in between scheduled activities. But even waiting, to be precise, is a form of activity. It is seldom that we just empty our minds. I said I was keeping watch that night, and that was true, but I wasn’t really waiting for anything to happen. Of course I expected the hatchlings to start moving around in the tank at some point, but I was not impatient for that moment nor was my wish to see them swimming the reason for my sitting at the desk. There was a moment when I realized that I was not, indeed, waiting. There was something else I had to do. I had to try to comprehend the reality of what was happening right here, in my room, on my ordinary student desk, before my very eyes. And in order to understand that this was real, not a fantasy, not a dream, I needed to sit still and open my mind.
It is difficult to describe how time changes when you stop. Just stop. I thought then I knew that time was space, a blue space in which I was suspended like the mermaids in their green world. Time was a wide room with neither up nor down, neither front or back. As I sat in the night, the world that was not human started whispering in a multitude of voices. I thought of my little sister. Did she still hear these voices? Was she awake to all of this?
I listened to the slight hissing sound the radiator valves produced, to the occasional car engine, I listened to the night in front of my window, the rustling of branches, I thought I even heard the rook shifting feet in its watchful sleep. The red stone in my tank glowed silently, and even the silence had a sound to it because I was in the silence.