When Art Kept Me Off the Honor Roll

When art kept me off the honor roll. 

I’ve always been drawn to art, but I quickly associated art with being able to draw, something I wasn’t naturally good at.

However, throughout elementary school and junior high I loved each of my art classes. My ninth grade year I signed up for art as an elective. It was the first year that it was not a required part of the curriculum.

I enjoyed my class, and tried my best. As with all classes art required a grade. My grades usually were a B which overall was fine with me until the one time I almost made the A Honor Roll. 

I was thrilled to have made an A in all my classes, that is except art. My standard B stood out like a sore thumb among a row of A’s. It seemed crazy to me that art was what was keeping me off the honor roll. 

I felt helpless because art wasn’t as easy as studying for a test, and yet at the same time it was probably my favorite class. After that year I never took art again until it was required in college. By that time I had accepted the fact that because I couldn’t draw very well I was obviously not artistic.

As I think about it now, it makes me sad that for so long I believed the lies I told myself. In fact, my freshman year of college while taking a design class I seriously considered studying interior design. I found that I seemed to do quite well in a more abstract art form. The elements of design were all something that I could do. 

One day we viewed a movie about careers in art. As I watched intently I learned that interior design required sketching ability. My lie surfaced once again, and I never considered the career as a possibility for me. Isn’t it ironic that today so much of interior design is done using a computer?

To be honest, I don’t have a burning desire to start a new career at this point in my life, but in thinking about this it makes me wonder how often we buy into a lie or half-lie about ourselves? What I didn’t know then in my short fourteen years of life was that drawing is a skill that can be taught. 

I may never have been a Rembrandt, but that would not have been required. Today, I still find myself drawn to art, and I see the same desire in my three year old grandson. He doesn’t yet know to worry about whether something is “good” or “bad.” He just knows that he loves to draw tractors, and color each one using his Twistables.

Don’t let some misplaced lie hold you back from doing what your heart knows to be true.