Dear Budget makers; the arts are not dispensable.

I can not remember a time when I have not made things. I can not remember a time when my brain didn't immediately crop and compose whatever I am looking at. I can not imagine my head not saying "what if" and "what about if you"... This is not a brag or a exhalation, just a constant reality of my life, just as each of you have a constant in yours. This is also influenced by the weeks of going through all my saved possessions and artwork as we prepare to move.

pen and ink done in middle school.

wood block done in high school

monoprint done in high school

welded sculpture done in high school

My memories are not of place, or even always, of people but of what came from it. I remember a Joseph (the one with the coat of many colors) from pre-school Sunday school. He had a circle that attached with a brad and had many feet on it, so when you moved them it looked like he was walking. I remember carefully choosing the colors for his coat. I remember drawing a moose in kindergarten, and I was dumbfounded when my teacher got so excited about it. It was just a moose!

My first run-in with school authorities was when I (apparently) dripped black paint on the floor of the first-grade while doing my art project. In fourth grade, There was a three-dimensional jaguar for the Amazon (country not software!) display, and my clay sculpture of Lily the dog next door. 

Jumping ahead to middle school, there was the introduction to printmaking and pen and ink drawing, which thrilled me beyond imagining. The combined physicality of carving and the starkness of the line was really compelling to me.

In high school, I also tried my hand at jewelry (couldn't do gold because gold was too expensive at $35./ounce!) and the pottery wheel. Neither really got to me because of the finesse and lack of immediacy in the processes involved, so I did slab clay pieces and discovered welding. And I continued to draw and print.

High School was a challenge for me, and without Don Hunt and Evelyn Bauman I may never had made it out. Their art rooms provided a sanctuary for those of us who didn't quite fit in with the science or jock activities. It was a place you could bare your soul, speak your mind through your hands, and go at your own pace, it was a place where hearing a different drummer was lauded not chided.

Then came adulthood, but I will leave that for another post.

I was not alone in these art rooms. There were many, then and now, who found refuge and joy there; And now budget cuts find them "dispensable". Sorry, but I think not.

Art has been a compulsion and solace for humans since the cave paintings at Lascaux. The arts have, at one extreme, moved our souls and celebrated or exposed human events; and, at the other extreme, made life simply more enjoyable and pretty. The arts are both subjective and objective; They are private in the creation and and public the experience. The arts can be a livelihood, a hobby,  a rehabilitation or a spectator sport. But they are not dispensable or a luxury to society.

What can you and I do? Make sure our kids have a box of crayons as well as an Xbox. Make sure that in between Spiderman and other blockbusters, they get to go to live theater. How about a stroll through a sidewalk art show. Do we get as excited about the art elective as we do about another AP math class. Do we  chuckle at the idea of an art or music choice for a profession; maybe we should acknowledge it is a viable option?

Finally. And maybe most importantly, do we check the opinions of our candidates about education in the arts before we vote? Maybe we should.