When I was a teenager, art gave me a voice. Like so many miserable teenage girls, I used things like paint and photographs and Photoshop to visually articulate emotions, frustrations, desires, questions and (I’d even say) some wisdom that I had been shoving away, storing up in tightly-locked cases of “that’s not pure” and “that’s wrong” and “that’s too much” and “that’s not good enough or smart enough or cool enough or pretty enough or xyz enough.” I was indeed a sad and troubled young lady, but underneath all that, I was quite a scared and angry thing. But I didn’t know or I didn’t think I was allowed to be scared, and certainly not angry because…well, because angry was “too much” and angry would cause conflict and angry would upset people and angry could potentially bring all kinds of ghosts out of all kinds of closets.
Teenage angst. Plenty of us have been there, and I won’t trouble you further with this same-old-sad-teenage-girl story. But I will go back to that first line I wrote, which contained the idea of art and voice. Art as a vehicle for voice.
Now, some fifteen years or so beyond being that sad and secretly scared and angry teenage girl, I’ve in some manner of speaking become an Artist. I’ve practiced art and looked at art and studied art and made art and critiqued art and taught art and sold art and used art and been through/am going through about a gabillion love/hate relationships with art. I know art. And somehow, through the love/hate, art remains the primary vehicle for my own oh-so-often forgotten or mistrusted or self-conscious voice. It is very much the basis for how I encounter and understand the world.
Now, I’m “getting older”. I’m on the other side of 30 and I’m acutely aware of this idea of “getting older”. At 31, I’ve only managed to do about 1/16 of the things I imagined I could do by this time when I was still a budding little artist at Houghton College between the ages of 19-23. I’m not the famous artist I dreamed I’d be. I haven’t become the “next Sally Mann” or the “next Eva Hesse” or the next number of artists whose work I spent hours drooling over and taking into my consciousness, helping me come to deeper terms with what it meant to be human. I haven’t impacted people profoundly with my work. Heck, I don’t even keep up a disciplined studio art practice. I haven’t shown my own work in ages. I don’t go to museums often enough. I don’t do a lot of artsy things I “should”. I have, though, remained at the very least remotely engaged in the world of Contemporary art. And I have managed to grow increasingly irritated with the overall vibe and output I see in said Contemporary art world: shock shock shock and I’m more clever than him and I’m more clever than her and look at how clever this new tower of cardboard boxes is and are you serious with the piles of trash on the floor passing as artwork? and political political political! and globalization and how-is-the-internet-changing-the-way-we-communicate and blah blah blah — oh how the “messages” abound. I mean, don’t get me wrong: I get it. And on some level I do love it. I studied it and ate it up and and continue to study this stuff and eat it up and I try my little artsy hand at participating in the grand conversation. But then there’s the point where my eyes glaze over. I have to read the stupid text with the stupid pile of trash on the floor and my excitement secretly dies away (I never show this to the gallery curator, of course. I feign interest and understanding). My heart-strings are so rarely tugged. I leave museums and galleries and art blogs and conversations about art wondering, most of all, about whatever happened to a space for transcendence.
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Transcendence is one of the seven pillars of character that form the basis of our educational approach for LEAD. The other six pillars are: trust, respect, caring, citizenship, responsibility and fairness. I think transcendence is (not so) secretly my favorite. It’s the one I personally connect with most and the one I think has most changed and formed my own life. But it’s probably also the most difficult one to tackle with our current target age of 10-12 year-olds.
Now, enter: Transcenda.
Transcenda is (apparently) my alter ego. I just developed her last week as a “test-run” for the first art project in our new session of LEAD. I’m cooking up a plan to have our groups of 10-12 year-olds develop alter egos and costumes for their alter egos as a way to explore the seven pillars of character as they’re exhibited (or lacking) in our individual selves. And then after the alter egos: duh duh duh! Self portraits. Drawing the vulnerable, exposed self — sans his or her alter ego costume with all its protective powers and bigger-than-life-ness. I think it has potential to be a great project.
So who is Transcenda? Transcenda wears a black dress that’s covered in bright glowing stars and colorful, shimmery galaxies. Her dress has been transformed, as it were, by her numerous trips into outer space, where she has discovered and understood the “secrets of the universe”. She carries this wisdom with her, and it exudes from her in the most genuine and gentle of ways, bringing a sense of calm and safety to anyone in her presence. She surrounds herself with beauty, and she is a powerhouse of an artist — everything she creates is honest and communicates the mysteries and wisdom she holds deep inside. She carries a simple graphite pencil (symbolizing, of course, her brilliant little artistic self) and a palm-sized golden ball. When “activated”, the golden ball becomes a spacious and glorious cocoon — a safe-haven of a gathering-place. A space for everyone, with no divisions: no blacks or whites, no rights or wrongs, no goods or bads, no us and them, no xyz…just people exactly as they are in all their strangeness and difficulty and beauty. People safe. Transcenda is some kind of wise, artist, mother/Jesus-like, unconditionally-loving, all-understanding, middle-ground standing, safety and beauty-creating and all-embracing character that, above all, offers a silent kind of safe and beautiful energy in the universe. Wow, ryte?
And now enter the critical, clever, ironic character part of myself (and yourself): Transcenda is ridiculous.
Bash! There she goes. Bang! She can’t be. Boom! Something or someone so subtly beautiful and powerful can’t really exist. Kapow! You’re a stupid and silly dreamer for ever even going there.
Ground yourself you silly girl. You’re not that smart. You’re not that creative. You’re not that capable. You’re not that xyz. You’re not….you’re not…you’re not…
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Ah, Transcenda. I guess Transcenda is some character I fancy I’d like to be. She’s the one, probably, who has done at least 3/4 or maybe all of those things that the 19-23 year-old budding college artist imagined she’d do by this other side of 30. She’s one of the characters, at least, that I’d like to be. There are others for sure. Some darker than Transcenda, some cooler than Transcenda, some more clever and intelligent than Transcenda. But last Wednesday afternoon as I brainstormed in my little notebook about what on earth my own alter ego might look like, as I fought my own resistance to creating and nearly choked on the tears of my own vulnerability and not-ever-really-snatched-up-dreams, and as lists of what Transcenda could do began to form, I felt particularly connected to her. I wanted to be her. I wished I could put on the galaxy-dipped dress I had sketched on the paper and become all those magical things she was.
And it hit me like some comet: all my fears and worries about inadequacy. All my concerns that I won’t be able to come up with projects that are strong enough to really get the message of LEAD across to our kids. All my big Ego-related crap about other people being better than me or smarter than me or more artistic than me or xyz than me. All my scared little girl-self flooded to the surface as I sat there making this alter ego. And I cried. And I thought, my god: this silly alter ego project is making me cry.
And I was reminded then and there of art as a vehicle for voice, as an entrance to the self. Art as an exposer of truth and vulnerability and beauty and the complex things in life that language can’t get a handle on articulating. Art as some sort of spaceship into strength and trust and transcendence, into what’s “above” or what’s “out there”. Into what we could be, what we could do, what we could think and make and love and honor as a human race. But also a spaceship smack dab into the middle of what is. What really and truly is in all its complexity and layers. Art as a place for understanding. For exploring. For questioning. For us.
For us.
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As I enter my planning sessions for LEAD, as I try to gather-up and draw-upon all my artistic knowledge and all my experience working with kids and people in general, I’m struck (once again) by the sheer power of the artistic voice. I’m struck by its transformative power in my own life, in the lives of so many artists I’ve studied and admired, in the lives of my creative friends, colleagues, and family, and — probably most importantly at this moment — in the lives of these kids we’re going to work with this year. I’m reminded to believe in, to harness, and to surrender, in a way, to this power. To trust in it as a real force that is “out there” and “in here”, and to claim it as my own, not just as an imagined power for Transcenda.
To me, LEAD is all about this artistic voice. It’s about giving kids and mentors a toolkit of sorts for their own creative voices, and through those voices, a space for perspective and a space for bridges between what we understand and what is foreign, what we recognize and what is a blurry abstraction, what is legible and what makes us feel illiterate, what makes us feel safe and what makes us feel threatened. It’s about creating that cocoon-of-a-safe-gathering space for people to express themselves — their hopes and fears and dreams — and it’s about trying to turn all that cosmic dusty stuff into a reality, into a solid form here on earth. Here in Holland. Here in Amsterdam. Here in Bos en Lommer, in Slotermeer, at Al Wafa, in the yet-to-be-determined other schools we’ll be working with, and in the eyes and hands and voices of those kids and of ourselves.
And so I grab my pencil and my palm-sized golden ball…
