My eighth graders have been drawing self-portraits and then choosing a daemon for themselves, and drawing that too. This concept comes from Phillip Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials, comprised of The Golden Compass (in America) /Northern Lights (everywhere else, how weird is that?), The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass, which tells the story of Lyra Belacqua and her friend Will as they discover a series of parallel universes and various epic events unfold.
We listened to the audio version of the first book in the car on the long drive to Philadelphia when the boys were eleven or twelve. We were all enthralled after the first few words. I remember all four of us sitting under its spell in a parking garage, not wanting to get out of the car and give up our enchanted journey across the worlds with the two children and all the other people and creatures. Even though we were on our own exciting adventure to a new place, the story gripped us so, that even in the landscape of the city we were talking about the book, about what had happened and how we thought things would pan out, that wonderful power of literature to fascinate and beguile.
The most lovely concept in the book is that everyone has a daemon, which is a kind of physical manifestation of your soul, I think. It takes the form of an animal, which can change its identity when you are still young, so it can be a moth, or a cat, or a monkey, whatever, but when you hit puberty it chooses just one animal, which most represents the person, and stays that animal thereafter. Everyone's daemon is the opposite sex, and cannot bear to be more than a few feet away from its human, there is a kind of invisible thread linking the two.
So each student had to think about what animal most represented themselves. Which was hard for some kids, and easy for others. One girl painstakingly drew a beautiful owl sitting on her shoulder, both of them looking out at the viewer with solemn eyes. She has a great tragedy in her life, and the final work is a beautiful picture. Another little boy, who is still very young, drew himself as a guinea pig, which has all kinds of connotations, and is also very sweet. After all, guinea pigs are the most innocent of creatures.
Most of the children finished these pictures a while back, but of course there are always the stragglers, some because they struggle with drawing, others as a consequence of being perfectionists, creating a beautiful background as well as the two linked personae. Today one girl finally finished her drawing and brought it to me to give judgement. It was lovely, light and lithe like her, and the animal was a lynx stretching on a tree behind her, which was just perfect. While we were talking, I experienced that purity of gaze of which I spoke a while ago telling the story of my choir-teacher. This girl has blue-green eyes and while we were talking she stared into mine with such intent, such youth, such sincerity, such a love of art and life. I felt quite honoured after our conversation.
Their next project is a grid-based painting, which, when all put together, will make up Chagall's La femme et les roses. This painting, although it is mostly of flowers, has one of Chagall's signature rosy naked women at the top of the painting. A 14-year old boy got the piece with the breasts and head, and I thought he would enjoy painting it, but he churned out a really poor very fast job, perhaps he was embarrassed. So I worked on it today, because really, if that is not done well, the whole thing will look awful. It is interesting to see how differently everyone paints, how some observe so carefully, while others don't even seem able to distinguish between light and darker tones. I think it is going to look beautiful though, because in general this class is very good and strives to perform well in every project.
No comments:
Post a Comment