Nature’s greenery becomes the focus of art lessons with my granddaughters
When I learned that my granddaughters’ elementary school curriculum didn’t include art, I prayed for a way to share my passion with them. To me, art is vital to life—it touches everything, from how an Instagram photo is cropped to how a table is set. The artistic eye defines our sense of beauty in everyday objects of interior design and the clothes we wear to a wedding. From fine art to scrap art, art is everywhere. And although our work may not reach the heights of God’s achievements, as in a star or orchid, our works show an ancestral trait: we’re born to create.
Many of us have connections to the creative arts, which are more accessible these days thanks to Pinterest and Hobby Lobby. On Pinterest I can put in a single search phrase, say “paper art,” and see everything from papier–mâché faces to quilled cards, collages to origami. Perhaps you’re accomplished in a certain field, such as knitting or landscape painting or jewelry design. I’ve fantasized more than once about becoming a portrait artist; although I was an English major in college, studying a human face is like reading a good book. There’s so much there, and the more you sketch and study a face, the more plot twists you encounter in a lilting brow or aging dimple. Take Dolly Parton, for example, the crush of a new generation. The dimples that made her disarming fifty years ago are winning over an entirely new audience. Without them, her face would lose its warmth and charm.
But portraiture is only one category of the arts. In our city we have crazy and elaborate murals on many buildings, Chihuly chandeliers in fancy lobbies, and monumental bronze statues at the intersection of Trade and Tryon, Charlotte’s center. Art expresses our aspirations and fears, our wonder or longing for order. It’s at the center of God’s creation, too; why, you can’t look at the underside of a zinnia, at the cup of tiny leaves in perfect rows supporting the petals, without seeing an artistic mastery of design. From a seed that looks like a small black flake, a zinnia grows until it’s studded with masses of brilliance, budding again and again, a living canvas. God did not give us a gray world.
So as I prayed about a theme to anchor a year of art with my granddaughters, I got the idea of studying leaves. Yes, I know that sounds tedious, but stay with me for a minute. They’re everywhere in the world, from underwater fields of sea grasses to desert cacti to Arctic willow, a shrub eaten by caribou. Leaves are in the background, so to speak, and are often the sky’s counterpoint in the planet’s landscape. Imagine a world without their gift of green. We’re wired to need that color, and if it’s not there, we crave it so much that even photographs of trees have been proven to reduce stress. Photographs. We go to great lengths to get those green leaves. In Mendoza, an Argentinian city I visited several years ago in the foothills of the Andes Mountains, thousands of trees line the streets in a region as dry as Phoenix. How did they get there? In the 1800s, water from the Mendoza River was routed into hundreds of stone-lined ditches throughout the city, and a massive tree-planting campaign ensued.
Wherever there are leaves, there is life. And they protect life, too. Their tiny pores open to absorb carbon dioxide or release oxygen. They keep our air clean. They are the unnoticed house servants of the manor, cleaning up while the lords and ladies go about their business.
Now if you think this sounds like a lot to lay on an eight- and ten-year-old, you’d be right. And as a grandparent, the last thing I wanted to do was to bore them. I had once taught art to middle school students in a private school, so I had a general idea of how to keep things entertainingly academic. Yet I wasn’t only interested in education, but in sharing my faith. As important as art is to me, making a connection to its origins was essential. Years from now I’ll be gone, and if I leave nothing else behind, I want them to know the greatest adventure of life.
Every month for ten months, on a Wednesday afternoon, we met to do something fun with leaves. We sketched and painted oak and poplar and maple leaves; we made rubbings. We cooked with sage leaves, sautéing them in butter and then adding pasta and Parmesan for a delicious lunch (thank you, New York Times, for the recipe). We smelled and tasted rosemary, tarragon, oregano, thyme, and mint leaves. What flavors! We adhered dried ferns to pillar candles with warm spoons. We cut leaves from colored paper and made pretty wreaths. We embossed leaves on paper and pressed leaves into clay to make bowls. We brushed melted chocolate on the undersides of clean camellia leaves to make decorations for cupcakes.
Leaves, leaves, leaves!
Each lesson had a simple spiritual message. For example, to become like Christ, we must get as close to him as the melted chocolate that was spread over the camellia leaf. Only by getting right up next to him can we be molded to look like him. Or take the example of the pillar candle. A flat, dried fern is laid on the candle’s surface. A spoon is heated over a flame and then rubbed slowly over the fern. The heat melts the wax underneath, and as the wax cools, it locks the fern in place like glue. Strangely, the process doesn’t discolor the fern, and the result looks like it belongs on a table in a Martha Stewart magazine. Here’s the analogy: life’s “fiery troubles” (to use Peter’s phrase) press us on the Lord. Just as the hot spoon melts the wax without burning the leaves, so our troubles fuse us to God without damaging us. And there’s an unexpected benefit: against him, the details of our character are easy to see. The fern’s rich green color and perfect symmetry of leaves stand out on the candle’s creamy background.
We laughed, got messy, talked, and tried our hands at new things. For me, it was a year of getting to know them better, of giving the gift of discovery.
For them, I hope their eyes were opened to one of the most overlooked and underrated elements of God’s creation. Leaves flourish in every climate, on every continent, and in every age. They appear on the pages of illuminated manuscripts and entwine the capitals of architectural columns. They enhance the blue flowers in Vincent Van Gogh’s Irises and embroider Oscar de la Renta summer gowns.
I pray my granddaughters will see that leaves are like the background in a painting. Although they may not be the focus, their presence changes the way we see the main subject. Like Dolly Parton’s dimple, we’d be lost without them.