Art Class & Getting Dirty

The chance to be taught by someone who knows a lot about what they are teaching has me hooked on a local drawing class in the ¨Casa de Arte.¨ I feel so privileged to be in a town where affordable opportunities present themselves to youth. Heading into the third week of art classes I’ve nothing more than fill the back side of 5 sheets of photo copy paper with vertical and diagonal lines. Big deal ehh…A Picaso in the making… yeah!? But Professor Torres says you have to practice and “dominate” the fundamentals from which every image will be formed. The course is actually titled ¨Pintura¨ but it looks like we may not stroke a bush on some canvas until the second semester of class beginning in January. There’s no rush. Why should there be? Art is and expression of patience and patience I think is what helps allow the world to be happy.

Anyways I get to experience the feeling of being an international student like my good college friends, Rhaad of Bangladesh and Alcia of Jamaica and Ruben of Spain. It easy to feel like you have become the spectacle of the classroom, or the lost student asking questions whose answers were clearly addressed just 30 seconds before you bravely raised your hand. At least one of my best fiends in the community, Christopher, a 14 year old artist I the making, joins me for class. As an adolescent he’s totally over the whole back to fundamentals thing of patiently filling sheets of paper with straight lines, but I think it’s a great lesson in discipline for him…something I think he could use an extra dose of.

Anyways, learning how to draw will not come in one semester, nor without the practice of patience, but I’m loving the experience and the chance to share it with a young Dominican friend. On other fronts I’ve noticed my hands a little more worn as of late. Nothing to compare to the farming hands of my late grandfather John Wesley Oubre Senior, but I do know that at least I’m starting to develop some tougher calluses. A new tree nursery site has been created back of my house with the help of 2 earnest men, Jose Antonio and Pedro, and some loving kids. We are a small crew of 5-8, but a well juiced machine, especially when the Donas are aside us offering fresh squeezed lemonade or bread and coffee. The coolest thing about the nursery is that the trees are germinated from the very seeds that I have the kids in the neighborhood collect. They get to see the life cycle of a delicious tropical fruit from its sweet consumption to its seeding back into the earth where growth almost intantly happens with the strong Caribbean sun and rain. Right now we have an abundance of mango and avocado saplings just hoping we can branch out to chinola, guyaba, lechosa, and lemoncillo (all really great tropical fruits).

It´s totally a learning experience (fly by the seat of my pants), but I love just getting my hands dirty. I was talking with spry 70 year old Tonita today and we agreed that even here on the edge of the rural campo in one of the most productive agricultural regions of the Dominican Republic, there are few kids who find great interest in agriculture. For me it’s an exciting new adventure, for them it’s more work than they desire in a 21st century fused with technological advances that seem to make small scale gardens and trees nurseries a thing of the past. We work together to find a happy medium. We’re still waiting for that first tree to be ready to jump from its potted plant stage into the soil on the hillside of Ojo de Agua. I’ll keep you updated on the progress.

Dive into something new because there’s always something important to learn from trying.

Peace,
Jared