Hello Readers,
As I finished my last paragraph in my upwards of sixty page worth of essay finals week this semester, it provoked a question in me that I think many young artists in the city face; why am I taking eighteen credits? I know I’ll remove half of what I learned from my memory faster than dragging a file into the trash bin on my MacBook. We’re artists anyway! Is it possible to be taught the “way” of an artist? Or is creativity a gift we all learn to harness on individual paths?
To be honest I was always unsure about going to school, and after my first semester in college my conflict with education grew to be bigger than a succession from the union. As a musician who wasn’t trained classically, my chances of getting into a music school were slim (which is a whole other topic). I also figured I was the only one who could continue teaching myself that passion after eight years of being my own professor. So, because of societal pressures I decided to go to a university completely undecided on what I wanted study. This meant that unlike a majority of the population, my choice of schools was solely based on where it was located, not the programs they offered.
Of course, I decided on Manhattan.
To be honest, the city itself taught me more than all of my classes did my first year of school. I was paying fifty thousand dollars a year to explore, learn the streets, and explain to people I’m from Orange County, New York; not California. The reason for this lack of learning that was taking was in my life has to do with the core curriculum at liberal arts schools. It’s a lot like rewinding and taking all of your high school classes all over again, and I’m sure you all remember how fun parabolas are. It was here I learned that artists tend to mix with liberal arts schools like oil and water; lets just say there was a lack of matches to ignite my artistic flame in classes like “Mathematics For Life.” Eventually, the weight of loans on my back began making my legs tremble. The pot of gold at the end of this rainbow-like college career was losing its lucrative appeal and I was beginning to think about dropping out altogether. Luckily, I soon learned that oil and water still have the ability to make a delectable dressing.
It was my first semester of sophomore year and similar to how my freshman year of school went, I was bracing myself for a load of classes that would teach me YET AGAIN how to form a proper thesis statement (if you’re a university professor reading this; we get it already). I entered my first class that was titled “Romanticism and The Modern World”, which I was only taking to fulfill another core requirement. Then, everything changed. The professor started defining the entire Romantic movement for us; their love of nature, the internal conflicts they expressed through their words and their organic style that rebelled against the classic literature structure. I remember our professor read us a quote of Jean-Jacques Rousseau the first day, which was “I felt before I thought, tis the common lot of humanity.” My response was something along the lines of, “OK, one day I am putting that in ink on my skin.” I was hooked. We started reading Romantic poets from England, Russia and France. Words of Lord Byron, Alexander Pushkin and William Wordsworth played on repeat in my head. It didn’t take long for me to realize the reason I was engulfed by this literary movement was because I had been writing romantic poetry for eight years already – through my lyrics. In fact, I’d go as far to say that there is a little romanticism instilled in every singer/songwriter. On my way home after class that day I scribbled lyrics down in my notebook to a song that would eventually be called “Stages Of Seasons.” It was littered with the Romantic’s love to convey emotion through nature with lines like, “Staring at clocks hoping this will pass, maybe spring will help us burst and bloom.” To this day it remains a personal favorite of mine.
Studying this movement provided me with the keys to dusty doors of creativity inside me that had always been locked. These new portals have blessed me with a slew of songs, poems, scripts and short stories. Music was my first love, but this class revealed to me a new fixation; writing and literature. Combining the two has given me products sweeter than chocolate covered strawberries. No surprise, by the end of the semester I declared myself as an English major.
So do I think that school can necessarily teach you how to be an artist? Not quite. But if it wasn’t for school I would have never found this new outlet for my creativity. For me, school has had an indirect and unexpected impact on my artistic growth. Here is the equation: passion plus school equals self-discovery. This self discovery leads to creativity, which is then recycled back into your passion. The outcome? Art. Woah, that’s something they don’t teach you in trigonometry. I know college isn’t for everyone; I’m still not fully convinced it’s for me (nor do I know what I’m doing with my life, except writing this for you right now), but it may help you discover that there are paint strokes to be added to your current self-portrait.
Live, Love, Learn,