A guest speaker today in class. You never know if students are going to be interested, but just the change in the regular flow of class is usually welcomed by students. And by teachers, too. It’s a bit of time when teachers don’t have to be holding quite so many things in their mind as class rolls along.

José Miguel works in the school cafeteria. He is a former teacher and a very current artist. He’s drawing teacher portraits for a project of mine, they are incredible. 

He starts with some paintings and asks the students if they bring up any particular feelings. Dark … tired … giving up, the students say. I don’t know the paintings, but one depicts a poor, overworked man, in a torn white shirt. The feeling it gives me is one of hopelessness. 

José Miguel flips to a new painting. Picasso’s Guernica. More hopelessness. And then the surprise.

The first paintings he has shown also were also by Picasso, as an absolute teenage phenom. Incredible. From realism to the Picasso we all know. I think of an elementary field trip to the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Fifth or sixth grade, maybe. The tour guide shared with us a quote from Picasso, something like “It took a lot of work to paint like a child.” In the funny way memories are, I can see where the tour guide was standing, but not the man himself. I see more clearly the white steps I was standing on, the flat floor in front of me, the blur where paintings were hung on the wall, and the sense of other elementary students around me. I don’t know what they remembered from that day, but I went home and told mom that Picasso was proud to paint like a child, and what was the point of that? We’ve laughed about it more than once in the last fifty years.

Maybe it’s not such a bad idea, though. I spend a lot of time with the adult teachers I work with suggesting that they teach more like summer camp, that they create more of an environment like elementary school. Or at least, like the elementary school I remember, it seems they spend a lot of time nowadays thinking about standards and objectives and all that. I remind them how happy parents are on a weekend morning if their children keep themselves busy, doing their own thing. We need more of that. Parents lean into the room, see that the kids aren’t doing anything dangerous, maybe give them more markers, some tape, a cardboard box. No standards there, just play. Maybe we need to learn to teach a bit more like a child. 

I’ve been lost in my thoughts. The students are looking now at a pen drawing, one of José Miguel’s own, of an old Don Quixote lying in a bed. It’s drawn from the original in a 1863 novel. This picture could be hopeless, too, he is perhaps dying, maybe he’ll never rise again from this bed. But it is a different feeling from earlier, maybe because we know the story. This is a man who did his thing, tilted at his own particular windmills, gallantly. A life well lived? 

Arnold Schwarzenegger. A drawing. Amazing. The students ask how long it took. “20 hours.” But then as the conversation continues, we learn that José Miguel threw away four drafts before starting the drawing we are talking about.

Hannibal Lector. His face tinged with red. Anger. Danger. Created from markers, then paint, then pastels and acrylics. One iron jail bar running from top to bottom, across his left cheek.

Jesus Christ. A close up of his face, but with enough context that we know he is hanging on the cross. Seconds before death, José Miguel tells us. Staring at us.

John Lennon. Droopy eyelids behind his signature round frames. Relatively short hair, calm on the outside, but perhaps revolutionary inside. Bic pen. The kind you buy in a pack of ten at the supermarket.

“How do you know when you are finished?” asks the teacher. “Honestly,” Jose Miguel answers, “I’m never happy with my pictures. I’m never done. The hardest part is to sign my name. Then it’s done.” I was at an event a couple years ago, a book reading and question and answer with Kate DiCamillo. She said the same thing. With every book she knew all the things that she wasn’t happy about, all the things she might change if given the chance. But at some point with each story she signed off with the publisher and those mistakes were duplicated over and over and over and distributed, in her case, across the world.

“It seems easy for you,” says one student, visibly impressed. “No, no. It’s not easy. You just need to be patient and to work and to practice. Forget to be Rembrandt or Picasso. You just need to transmit your emotions to people.”

“Have you ever taken art classes?” “Never. I am a physical education teacher. I chose that because it was a three year program. Art was five years.”