The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

People ask me all the time why do we put art in schools anyway? Why do we spend money on pretty little do-dads and frills when we could buy more books or hire more teachers?

It’s a good question. When I first met with the art committee for Panther Lake, we were in the old school. It was old and pretty ugly. But now you got a new school. Which is drop dead gorgeous. Beautiful architecture, beautiful building, state of the art teaching equipment. I’d be willing to bet you buckaroos learn better in this school than the old school.

The idea is to create an environment where we ENCOURAGE you guys to learn. To explore. To use your IMAGINATIONS. To ask questions and look for answers. We want you to feel safe and we want you to have all the tools you need to do that. Computers and books and all the rest. We also want you to have gymnasiums and ballfields so you can exercise and play, cafeterias so you’ll get good meals, all this so you can have healthy bodies which is important for healthy minds.

And the last thing we add to all this is ART. Some folks don’t value art very much, but I’ll tell you what, art is all about a couple of things. One, it hopefully makes your school a more interesting and beautiful place. And if it’s good art, it makes you look at it and wonder about it. It makes you realize there are other ways of seeing the school, of seeing the world.

I hope when you look at the art, it makes you want to wonder what it is, what it means, what maybe the artist meant. Good art makes you think about it. It isn’t just pretty, it’s different and it asks you to examine it.

I called the glass murals we put in Panther Lake the Metamorphosis Series. You know, like tadpoles turning into frogs, or catepillars making cocoons then coming out as butterflies. They both change into something totally different. It’s a little miracle, really. I built a pond where I live just so I could have a place for the frogs to lay eggs and hatch into tadpoles and then grow into adult frogs. Amazing.

But the REAL DEAL is that you guys are the tadpoles. You guys are going to change as you learn and grow. Who knows what you’ll be, right? I didn’t know I’d learn to be an artist. But I did. A few years ago I built my own house. Every bit of it. I never built much of anything before, but I did it. I built a sailboat and I learned to sail. I built a banjo and I started a band and then I became a singer.

What we want for all of you is to understand that life is WIDE OPEN. You can be whatever you want. We want you to see this school and your life as full of opportunities and options. We want you to explore and be curious. What we want you to SEE, what we want you to understand, is that the one real art is making YOUR own life. You get to create yourself. But to do that you have to see what possibilities there are out there. You have to develop your IMAGINATIONS and your CREATIVITY.

And that’s why we put art in, to give you some small idea of what your imagination can do. Not so you can become artists like me necessarily, but so you’ll bring art and imagination to WHATEVER you want to do. So you’ll make everything you do more interesting, more unique, more YOU. And if you can do that, I guarantee, you’ll turn into a butterfly and you’ll learn how to fly and that’s really why we put art in schools and libraries and all the other public buildings we can, not just for you kids, but for us big kids. We all need to grow wings.

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