A teachable moment
/
Unsilent Night Newnan, 2017
Last night I was at Backstreet Community Arts to cohost the lantern-decorating workshop for Unsilent Night Newnan, wherein families can come and apply colors and shapes to paper lanterns which they will carry while walking around Newnan’s court square on December 6, playing Phil Kline’s magical Unsilent Night music. (Backstreet is 18+ during normal operation.)
It’s always a fun time as parents and children face that ultimate challenge, Making the Thing That Is Not, and discover how much fun it is to do.
We show them some examples, explain the event and the concept, and then turn them loose, offering advice, materials, and tools as we go along. Many lanterns turn out to be quite lovely, of course.
Along the way, I constantly reassure our artists that at the event, they’re going to be strolling around the square and most people will not have time (or inclination) to examine their work very closely, i.e., don’t worry about small boo-boos in your lantern or even big ones. People are not going to notice, and if they notice, it won’t matter to them. The event itself is so charming, so lovely, so mystical, that not even my ABORTIVE ATTEMPT will alarm them.
There was one young artist who, early in the process, was distressed that her lantern was ruined after she painted the top half with blue watercolor and didn’t like what she saw. She asked for a new lantern, to start over. We told her that due to budgetary constraints we could only provide one lantern per artist, but we’d help her figure out how to “fix” it.
First I told her that the patchy, uneven blue paint was actually quite pretty, like the sky. I suggested we put a light in it and take it outside to see how it looked.
Of course, it looked beautiful, which I reiterated. I suggested she could paint little “V” birds on it. She thought that it needed grass, so she headed back in to paint the lower half green.
And then there she was, showing off her lantern to me: a blue sky with a flock of V birds, a grassy field, and a yellow tissue paper sun. She was so excited and proud, and she wanted me to come outside with her to look at it.
It was lovely, and she was beaming.
I said, “Now you know how to do art: Make mistakes, then fix them.”
(I should have gotten a photo, and I didn’t.)
Here endeth the lesson.
I have to post this photo of one of our young artists who decided after she finished her lantern to go a bit sideways:
::sigh:: Young people. Whattaya gonna do, amirite?
