The art camp gallery

Forget the TCAPs. Here’s a real progress report

A divorced parent, Laurie Perry Vaughen (above right) is best known as “Lorna and Jared’s Mom.” An award-winning poet, she is a communication specialist at EPB and volunteer at the multi-cultural St. Andrews Center in Highland Park, where she manages the community garden.

By Laurie Perry Vaughen

Following art camp this summer, I converted my living room into a gallery space showcasing the emerging artist known as Jared—age 10.

Along the mantel we strung watercolors, pastels and a study of human figures that morphed Transformers, Bionicles, C-3PO and 1960s-era science fiction droids. White chalk on black construction paper allows a parent to see the process of thought, the mistakes that are blurred like clouds, as well as the bold, confident lines. There were a variety of mediums, and mixed-mediums—all new vocabulary words for my art-savvy child.

Watercolors curled around the edges of semi-wet poster board that had smeared in the back seat of my Nissan on the way home. Art is indeed a process. Take the man Jared sculpted from corrugated cardboard boxes doused in tempera, worthy of any museum’s spotlight: The character looks remarkably like the archetypal Bob the Builder, yellow hard hat and all.

Rodin, move over.

Waxed paper in crayon colors, scratched into sophisticated studies of flora and fauna, was propped next to a grinning acrylic crab that looked formidable and charming at the same time. Together they were an impressive display of my son’s vibrancy and this intense immersion with real working artists.
The art camp gallery was more telling than any report card that uses a necessary abstraction of alphabet-soup grades, TCAP scores that no parent or teacher really understands, and reading grade levels that are suspect. I’ll read these over and over as a progress report and want to write back: “What did my son learn? What did he actually do? What did he get obsessed about, or apathetic?” I am blessed that, over the years, each of his teachers at Normal Park has found the time to offer a more thoughtful human narrative, reflecting their own desire to communicate with parents the joy of their vocation. “Jared now loves to write in his journal,” Mrs. K., his fourth-grade teacher wrote earlier this year. I carried that simple sentence in my heart’s composition book for weeks and measured my own success by its declarative form; it was so encouraging. “Finally,” we seemed to be saying to each other, after weeks worrying about his writer’s block and stubborn nature.
After we placed Jared’s art all around the room, we invited neighborhood children and friends over for a gallery opening. I took a photo of Jared in front of his artwork. A few days later, scrolling through my digital photos, I was taken aback by how tall he stood, how proud.
If you are the parent of a budding artist, there are many fine local art camps that are a great value, like the AVA camp Jared attended at Northside Presbyterian. If you don’t have a kid, but do have some spare cash, consider a donation for a scholarship to make the experience possible for a child who has no art program in his own school. I am glad to see a church that sees art education as part of its mission—the historical tradition of the church.

Now, I must go pick up my son from school, and I hope that, like da Vinci, he will be doodling in the margins—some technical innovation, like a flying machine, or perhaps something more allegorical, reminding us to look up when we enter the great cathedrals of our own daydreams.