Field Trip

This is a short (and very rough) ramble I penned while at the Springville Museum of Art yesterday with a group of honors students.

I’m sitting at an iron-wrought table with lattice work that reminds me of an over-cooked apple pie, my wideness squeezed into a matching cold apple pie chair. It was obviously not meant for my comfort. Amid the patrolling volunteer docents are seventy of my junior high students—good kids—meandering here and there, clipboards in hand. The remaining museum population on this cold March morning consists of a smattering of high school students from another county as well as a few roving pockets of knee-high elementary schoolers, complete with chaperon in tow. Here and there a single parent with toddler and stroller appear.

As I perused the art alone—the other teacher chaperons elsewhere—I couldn’t help but observe the other specimens—the human subjects-with the same scrutiny I used on the watercolors and graphite sketches. Most of my students were clustered in various locations discussing anything but art, searching for an alcove or a recess in the building where they would become invisible to teachers' eyes, a place where their thumbs could blaze on their phones in peace.

A select few sit on the weathered wooden benches, appearing to ponder the oil and canvas. But upon closer reconnaissance, they are merely mechanically filling out worksheets—getting their required exposure to art over with as quickly as possible. They read the placard to fill in a box on the paper, doing their duty to photocopied academia so their friends don’t have to giggle in the next gallery with out them longer than thirty-seven seconds.

“Sure, we saw all the art, Mr. A,” they said when I asked one particular band of boys twenty minutes after arrival if they had seen a particular gallery. “We even did the assignment.” A hand produces a misshaped green paper-irregular creases like only a junior high pocket can produce. Three more papers materialize from folders and pockets as if to say “See, we’re cultured; now leave us alone.”

Ah, true. They might have seen all the art, I muse as they disappear around a corner…perhaps even two or three times, based on my frequent sightings of them in various locations. A flirtatious scream from the direction the boys had headed-definitely NOT a museum voice. Matthew’s narration of the Savior’s use of parables comes to mind: “because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand (Matthew 13:13).

And so I question, not just here in the Springville Museum of Art, but in life, how many of my students, how many human beings race through the halls of life’s gallery with their eyes open without seeing anything. How many times do I sprint through the day without pausing to enjoy the beauty that surrounds me?

I remember as a teenager being clichéd by my mother to take time and smell the roses. I propose that we not only stop for the roses, but for the plainer, simpler beauties: the daisies and marigolds, even if they don’t have much of an aroma. And truth be told, most flowers plain stink. But there is still beauty to be had.

I consider Naomi Shihab Nye’s “A Valentine for Ernest Mann.” We need to take the time and reinvent the skunks of the world and see them for their potential, their beauty, even if we don't understand the splotches of paint that are supposed to be fruit or seagulls, or the hardships of a the world repressed until they explode onto a canvas. Most people would raise their eyebrows if I suggested that the combined smells of gasoline, freshly cut grass, dirt, and deodorant-tinged body odor reek of success. You might just run through the halls, looking and sniffing, and pass by without a second thought. But my wife sure loves the yard when I’m done on a Saturday afternoon. It's the details of the process, not just the final product that matter.

So, when I say stop and drink up the smell of floor polish (without getting high), or pause to listen to the giggle of three little princesses getting their toes painted in the basement by their mother, or I have you stop and observe a small bumblebee dancing from pansy to petunia while snow still hugs the earth, or point out a 7th grader helping a classmate gather up an explosion that was once his notebook, remember that it’s these small details in life, the brushstrokes, the composition behind the canvas of life, if you will, that make the difference between merely existing and really being part of this life.

I don't pretend to understand art or life. However, I can appreciate it. I try to use my eyes to see, my ears to hear, and my life to comprehend and enjoy the beauty. Maybe some of that can rub off on my seventy—well, at least the two or three who took the time to pause and listen and see for themselves.