If I’m lost I just ask myself what story I’m trying to tell

Queens again, the painting part of the mural has begun. I start each mural with high schoolers in a similar way - pour out primaries and gather everyone around to talk about what colors/parts they are most interested in beginning with. This is how I build a practice around allowing our desires and things that excite us to be what organizes our decision making process. It is clearer in context to a mural then some of my other classes, but in all of them, I'm looking to instill that quality of engagement with self/internal diagnostic towards pleasure or curiosity and how that can guide us productively, thoughtfully - how that can be underneath every effort we make in this life. I know how hard it was for me to reorient myself in that way much later in my life, and how difficult it must have been for my embodiment teacher to witness me struggle to negotiate with myself as she helped build new containers within to hear/feel/respond from that place - and I am grateful to have a space with students already skillful enough to resonate with the groundwork I'm exploring as I try to translate it into an art practice. Its nice to have positive results - evidence that the direction I'm going is a solid one. 

All of the returning students in this mural program have grown so much since the first time we began a project together last year, clear in their willingness to fill the space with their ideas and voices and drawings. One of them approached me during our session last week, while thoughtfully mixing a color they couldn't define yet and asked me questions adjacent to color theory - but more specifically how to know when colors fit or not. I explained how different artists create color palettes that feel connected - in particular - how mixing a drop of the same color in all of the colors unites them subtly, or when I use oil paint I choose not to clean my brush while I paint so there a natural connecting undertone. Similarly I have us continue to transform our paint mixtures, so they all are literally born from each other which has a similar uniting effect. The student asked me why I didn't explain that to the larger group, as a teaching moment. I asked him if last year it would have seemed important or made sense, when he shakily began painting for essentially the first time on something this large scale. I could see him understanding something about how I teach, which is very non traditional - emergent, support based, and always staying with them where they are at and letting them tell me when they are ready for the next layer of awareness and skill. This approach requires creating relationships with students where they feel safe and supported enough to come up against questions and reach out for my support, because they know without question that I am available and listening in a specific way. Depending on the environment and previous experiences with adults various students have (as well as their age/development level), this is a more or less effortful process. But it is the most important part.

An Art Therapist recently framed SEL (Social Emotional Learning) in a way that really helped me more concretely understand the nature of what I'm trying to to do. Just a phrase, in passing during a workshop - about how all of these steps are about decision making, the delicate space between thinking and doing where so many of us become hamstrung, choked up, stuck. The first place I came to understand the value of practicing how to be in relationship with the world was through conflict - an important piece of forming strong bonds, and the practice we all need in safe relationships to engage in conflict without fear of disconnection and loss. The years I spent studying Practices in Embodied Teaching repeatedly brought up the question about what it means to be a teacher, why any of us believe we should be teachers, the goals or needs we inadvertently bring into the room from that vantage point etc - and the pervasive idea that students are empty vessels waiting to be filled by our knowledge, which undermines and disempowers young people with rich full bodies and minds who are looking for containers with which to process/practice and understand how to engage with themselves and their already richly complex experiences in the world. Its not about me, or the inherent value of some arbitrary technique I might feel needs to be learned. More and more I am coming to understand that everything boils down to safe containers to practice making decisions so we can learn how to listen and extrapolate from the outcome of those decisions to guide the next series of decisions. As I build curriculum I am getting more and more focused on art media and practices that have a spaciousness around pausing and being able to make a different choice so the stakes are low, and reframing media/drawing outcomes we don't like as opportunities to reorient ourselves with increasing clarity about what we DO think/feel/believe/like/want - to build capacity for increasingly braver choices and more expansive potential outcomes with increasing self awareness as its own byproduct of the exploration. So they can practice being human and not feeling shame or fear about that humanness. So we can have an experience of being ok to be where we are at, rather then constantly being assessed for our future potential/value to some corporate entity, always being seen as who they will be or how they might potentially validate the adults around them. If you never learned that where you are at and what you are is exactly right, it may take excruciating effort to find and have that experience later in life - you might not even know it is an experience that is available. You may learn that to be alive means always striving for things you are not and don't have because you never got to have an experience of being good, or enough, or good enough to enjoy yourself at any moment. 

I'm starting to notice the different qualities that imbue the student body in different spaces I regularly encounter. I think last year I was having a hard time organizing all of my observations, but something feels clearer now as I move from school to school. At one school I subbed at last week, the sense of fraternal focus - a sibling like responsiveness to each other is clear, as well as an accompanying sense that familiarity/sameness is of utmost importance. Instead of being distracted by what I had witnessed here the year prior, I'm starting to understand that these are clues I can work with - not just things to be undone, but resources related to their mechanisms for bonding and communicating that I can work with to create bridges that feel familiar and eventually can move into unfamiliar and groundbreaking territory.

Being at that school again briefly threw the high school I am at on Wednesdays into sharp contrast, which I'd been struggling to have a feel for - while the students I've had so far mostly claim they are at this arts high school against their will and are not interested in art, there is a moody soulfulness - a preoccupation with feeling states and sense of selfness, and an undercurrent of resistance to authority even in the smallest of ways, tiny moments of reclaiming a sense of agency - that seem to me the most resounding definition of being an artist at any period in time. What rich ground to consider building curriculum in response to - ways they are already inclined to explore or crave guidance in navigating. There are so many clues, finding how the threads connect to form a larger picture is starting to help me see the spaces where my skills can actually build on top of the richness of the ground already laid, even if it is imperfect or lacking in support. 

As my ability to notice and name what I am experiencing of these environments gets more sophisticated, so too does my response to those cues. As sloppy and unkempt as this particular series of notes is, I am naming this so that I can refine it - so I can come back later to add depth to these glimpses of things I'm still trying to comprehend.