The blessing of blessing others with art

I painted the above two paintings this week while spending the week teaching junior high through high school students painting at The Cove camp. The Cove Camp is a Christian day camp which is run by a friend of mine, Brittany, and an extension of the school year after school program at The Cove. When the week began I was a bit nervous, not really sure how I would teach the students to paint, or what I would have them paint. There were four sessions, and each session was only an hour long. An hour is not very much time for working on a painting, especially when you are teaching neophytes. Brittany wanted the teachers to lightly base their curriculum around the story of creation/fall/redemption/restoration. The first day of creation we focused on putting in the base black lines. The second day of the fall, we painted in darker colors. On the third day 3 students wanted to start new paintings, so I let them do that and joined in with a new painting of my own. I was not sure how the week would turn out…however, the results were amazing.

Not only did the kids have fun, and create some really sweet paintings, but I also found the time deeply therapeutic. I planned on having each student create one painting, but several of the students went on to create a second painting. One of the students even told me that the class which I was teaching was her favorite class of the week.

But beyond this, I found the time to be deeply therapeutic to me. I have been doing a lot of watercolor pencil drawing/paintings on canvas, a lot of drawings, and last year was doing a lot of Jackson Pollock-like paintings with splattering paint on canvas, but this was really the first time I had picked up a paintbrush since I had to stop painting to begin preparing for my move. I had begun to forget just how much I LOVE painting. And yet this week while I was teaching the kids to paint, I began to remember just how much I love painting. Thus while I was blessing the students with the gift of learning art, they were in turn blessing me with reminding me just how much I love painting and with helping me get through yet another layer of the onion. Glory to God!