Southside Art League, Greenwood, Indiana
Opening Reception - Friday, October 15th 6-8pm
A Day in the Life
It’s 2:15am on a school night. I should’ve gone to bed a couple hours ago but I’ve become comfortable in my favorite lawn chair, enjoying the last couple inches of a cheap cigar I bought three nights ago. It’s a nasty habit but it keeps the pesky bugs away as I sit alone in my backyard. It’s the bugs that have kept me out here too long…not the pesky ones but the cicadas and crickets and katydids…those whose sounds accompany the changing of summer to fall. It’s become my favorite time of year, I suppose. I think it’s because of how dark and dense the trees get just before they shed their leaves…or the way the air feels in the early morning…or maybe it’s because of the correspondence to the new school year? I love the beginning of classes in August. The excitement and optimism of a fresh start is thrilling for the students and me both, I believe…and necessary to balance the dull and tired conclusion of classes in May. School has morphed from a “regular job” to a life-changing experience during the past couple years…the “COVID years” we’re calling them already. I wonder how I’ll remember all of this when I’m older? I wonder how old I’ll get? Time will tell, I guess.
It’s nearing 2:30 now, but I’m enthralled by the silence of my backyard. You see, my wife and I live in what I like to call a “highway house.” A busy stretch of road buzzes through our front yard most of the day, but passing cars become rare at this time of the night, or morning, or whatever. They’ll pick up again at 5 o’clock when the daily commuters and semi drivers start moving about. If you can manage to wake up early or stay up late, you can watch the early risers pass by with the glow of their cell phones reflecting off of their chins. I hate cell phones. I’m convinced my smart phone has made me more dumb…I can’t speak for everyone else. Every day I promise myself I’ll get rid of the damn thing. Shortly thereafter, I use it to buy something I don’t need from Amazon. I’m a hypocrite. I’m a hypocrite and an egomaniac, obviously…it’s a quarter ‘til three and I’m writing about myself in my backyard…on an iPhone “app.”
This highway house belonged to my grandparents. George and Avenelle Heaton were as opposite as they come. My grandfather was one of those “hard-work trumps everything” types with a coarse sense of humor that made him either friend or foe and nothing in between. My grandmother was the sweetest woman on planet earth, as most grandmothers tend to be from a grandchild’s perspective. But my grandmother was a kindergarten teacher…I’m not the only one who thinks she was the sweetest. I’m reminded of her kind character at least once a week, usually through stories told by my students’ parents. Brittany and I have kept her yellow roses growing. Yellow roses were Brittany’s grandmother’s favorite flower too. I’ve tried to decide what my favorite flower would be if I didn’t already have obligatory favoritism towards those in my front yard. Maybe those big white flowers on those southern magnolia trees? I’m not sure. Who was it that said, “The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know.”…Elon? Joe Rogan?
It’s 6:30am. I fell asleep in the lawn chair last night…or this morning…whatever. I woke up extremely confused and slowly made my way to bed. My back is sore…probably caused by my favorite lawn chair but possibly caused by a kidney stone…we’ll find out in a few hours which it is. I’ve been drinking cranberry juice like it’s cranberry and vodka. I’m not sure if it’s helping the situation as I’ve been told it will, but I do know this…it doesn’t taste nearly as good without the booze. Anyway, I’m off to school. The bugs are quiet now, but the mockingbirds are up early. They used exactly 13 different bird noises to wake me up 45 minutes before my alarm. It’s for the best as I could use an earlier start…we’re learning about the Parthenon and Giacometti and MC Escher and the Middle Ages today and I can’t find my slide shows. I’ve been told by the tech guy they were transferred to my “Google Drive,” whatever that is. It’s surely going to take me 45 minutes to find my lectures within some new type of digital world designed to make my life easier. No big deal, I’m breaking even on today’s timeline and I’ve always got Siri if I can’t find what I’m looking for…she knows how to Google, I think?
It’s 6pm. Good news…in lieu of a missed prep period siesta, I snuck in a ten minute nap at the end of the school day sitting upright at my desk. Bad news…I spent my entire prep period making four new slideshows. Good and bad news…I confirmed the kidney stone hypothesis. I feel fine at the moment, rested enough to pull another near all-nighter. After all, I’ve got some paintings to finish, a lawn chair to sit in, and a conclusion to write for this story you’re reading. Let me tell you this…it’s lonely nights like these I look forward to most. I take comfort in a certain amount of self-loathing that accompanies painting sentimental pictures I know few people will ever see, let alone care about. It reminds me of the planned procrastination of my college days, when I’d purposefully wait until 1am to start a 10-day project due at 9am…cardboard sculptures, color-aid collages and the like. There’s something magic about self-imposed suffering for art’s sake…or at least for the sake of painting useless pictures. But hey, how hard is it to stay up all night smearing colors around until they look like your loved ones? It’s not. Pretending to be an artist is no harder than pretending to be an insomniac, one just yields more crap to walk around.
It’s 11:37pm. I’ve been wallowing with a paintbrush in hand for a few hours now. This painting on my easel is going nowhere, or at least, I don’t know where to take it next…so I guess I’m done. Funny enough, I told a student earlier today “uncertainty in art is a starting point, not a conclusion.” In hindsight, I’m pretty certain I don’t know what that means, except for it’s the opposite of what I seem to be doing right now…hypocrite, like I said before. No worries, my ego-stoking art blather mostly goes unnoticed in the classroom. I’m okay with this, so long as I can keep being the caricature of an art teacher I hope my students have come to appreciate. They don’t need art school, they just need a long-haired hippie dippie character in their lives that seems to know more about pencils and paper than YouTube does. I just hope they know I’m not teaching solely for their sake. “Here for the kids” sounds great while begging for back-pats, but I’d be disappointed if my career choice gets misconstrued as some sort of pseudo-volunteerism. If anything, I need the kids more than they need me. They call me LeGrand, you know…just LeGrand. Sammy still calls me LeGrand…never Wyatt. I had Sammy in class several years ago and we’re great friends now. Megan and Nick call me Wyatt, but I suspect they call me LeGrand in private. Megan’s an artist. If she sticks around long enough, I hope to pass my teaching gig on to her. Her and Nick met for the first time in my classroom several years ago. Now, we meet every so often for dinner and opening receptions. When I think about it, most of my friends are former students. I sure hope I didn’t inadvertently manipulate these young people into befriending me years later? Did I act just cool enough to trick them into liking me? I guess I’m not too upset about it. If I ever need to validate my teaching career, I think I’ll just point to my friends…I’d rather have them than a legacy anyhow.
It’s 2am. The bugs are singing again. I could’ve gone to bed at midnight but the fear of another kidney stone attack has kept me up nursing a gallon of water while mindlessly staring at finished paintings and blank canvases. Like a true middle-aged hipster-type, I ask myself “what does all of this mean?” And after mumbling several witty one-liners and delighting at the notion of being an intellectual, I concede to knowing nothing still. If anything, I’m less adept at tackling those big questions today than I was yesterday. The more you know, the more you realize you don’t…care! If I could get back every minute I’ve spent wondering about “the big picture,” I’d have the time to paint a thousand little ones! Maybe, in a future bout of half-cocked mindfulness, I’ll discover something big. Maybe I’ll paint a masterpiece. Maybe I’ll get bored and decide to become a bowler…or a radiator repairman or an evangelist or a public nuisance. Until then, I hope to pull a few more all-nighters in front of blank canvases and finished paintings, trying my best not to care about anything but the bug sounds outside of my highway house.
It’s 2:15am on a school night.
-Wyatt LeGrand 9/24/2021