All Things New

36"H x 36"W

School is new and fresh and starting over for so many. I am reminded of fresh starts and blank canvases.

My first art class was at North Habersham Junior High School in the seventh grade. She is Bebe Williams now but once she was Ms. Irvin. She was cool and cute and eccentric in a Vogue kinda way, with bouncy blond bobbed hair and oversized glasses. She carried herself like an artist. The kind I had read about at the Clarkesville Library. She used her paintbrush like a magic wand.

Her art classroom was a chaotic swirl of creativity—pulsing with color, texture, and an invisible spirit of inspiration. Paper mache masks hung from the ceilings and sunlight spilled through streaked windows onto splattered tables and half-born masterpieces. I can still smell the tang of tempera paint, the woody musk of pencil shavings, and the earthy trace of wet clay.

The walls were a living gallery, splashed with student assignments—colors bleeding cobalt blues and cadmium red and greens like my grandmother’s grass on the hills of Habersham Mills. There were layers upon layers of pigment and possibility. In this room, even the mess had meaning and every stain was a signature of a creator. The room was expectant and it birthed art into me.

One day we were hard at work on a still life. I was struggling with perfect lines and shadows when the frustration and comparison snuck in. The harder I tried, the worse it looked. I ripped and crumbled the paper and began to cry. Ms. Irvin picked up the pieces and slowly smoothed the edges. She placed the paper in front for a gifted second chance—running her fingers over colored pencil marks like a mama might run fingers over a baby’s pink skin. She mumbled something about positive and negative space. About light and dark. About comparison and contrast. She encouraged me to take a step back. See the big picture. Class was almost over. And then she said something akin to this: “There’s always enough time to begin again. The best artists don’t ever stay in the lines.”

I wish Ms. Irvin knew how many times I’ve thought about her powerful words spoken to my 12 year-old impressionable self. I wish she knew the impact she had on the way I view art and life. I wish she knew I’ve began again and again and again and I’ve thought of her in doing so. Mostly I wish she knew that I’ve taken her advice and lived and painted a little outside the lines and it’s made me a freer, better, more hopeful person. 

Today feels like a good day to tell her.

Dear teachers. We need your steady. Your steady hope. Your steady words. Your steady strength and encouragement and kindness. We need your reminder that when things get hard and muddy and ugly—you are there to help us pick up the pieces and straighten all things out.

Dear teachers. Small, medium, and big hearts in every single school need you this year. Their hands and eyes and ears and hearts depend on you. In a world of comparison and contrast, point out the light in all the dark. Create positive space when it all looks like negative. Encourage these kids to pause. Slow the pace. Take a step back and see the bigger picture. Remind them of second and third and fourth and 100 chances and how it is never too late to begin again. And dear teachers, teach them paint outside of the lines, to erase the lines, and to hold the line. Tell them all the things that matter most in the life while they are listening.

Because you never know. They may just believe you.