Everyday Importance of Art

There was a closet under the stairs in my childhood home. It had a slatted door and was big enough to sit in comfortably. What the closet held was something I didn’t realize was special until much, much later. It all seemed so mundane: popsicle sticks, crayons, markers and construction paper. Coloring books and paints. Glitter. Glue. Stickers. Plaster of Paris.

While many children are raised in homes without so much as a generic watercolor print hanging over the couch, my childhood was abundant in art supplies and rich in creative experience. I knew Monet before I knew Led Zeppelin. I ran up the stairs of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, not to emulate Rocky, but to get to the gallery of Aztec ruins more quickly. I spent hours wondering what it was that was written in the print of Matisse’s One Thousand and One Nights that hung in our dining room.

For many people, perhaps with upbringings like mine, art is not an addendum to life. It’s not an optional pleasure for the well-to-do. It’s a part of everyday functioning, as necessary and consistent as the blood pumping through our veins.

“Everyone is involved in the arts whether we know it or not,” is how Georganne Bingham puts it. After nine years of helping grow the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, Bingham became the executive director of the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke in 2003. She oversaw the fundraising and building of Taubman before segueing into retirement.

“For artists, whether they’re painting or blowing glass or making pottery or something else, they’re telling the world who they are. It’s very personal and beautiful; it’s meaningful in a soulful way,” she said. “Even those who don’t have the inclination to draw or paint or feel like they have talent at all are still surrounded by art every single day. Everything we see is a work of art – a tree or flower or billboard or signs on buildings, even your furniture and clothes can be works of art.”

Gerri Young has not made a career of art so much as used art to offset the stress of her career. Young said she started sketching as a young teenager, mostly pictures of horses and women in hats. (“Maybe because I don’t wear hats very well,” she said.) But during an extremely stressful public relations job in Europe, Young realized she needed not just the beauty of art, but the outlet that immersing herself in the creation of art provided.

“I didn’t get serious about it until six or seven years later, though,” she said, recalling when a friend invited her to Italy for a week-long class in fresco painting. Frescos inspired watercolors. Watercolors inspired creative exploration of all sorts.

Recently, Young returned to the States after over 15 years of working abroad. She and her partner, Bill, bought a home in Blacksburg but have spent many hours on Highway 8, driving between their new home, where they are still unpacking boxes, and The Jacksonville Center, where Young has taken classes in slabwork pottery, raku finishes and monotype printing, just to name a few.

“I want to try it all and see if any one thing jumps up at me and says this is what I should do for the rest of my life,” said Young.

My mom-supplied arts closet is long gone but I still make a point to keep the essentials – construction paper, paints, glue, old magazines and sewing supplies of all sorts – on hand in case I or a visiting nephew feels a creative stirring.

As Bingham so eloquently put it, “To me, art is the most important thing we have. No one can take away our imaginations. It’s the one thing we all have in common and that we can all find pleasure in.”

Sarah Beth Jones is the marketing coordinator for The Jacksonville Center for the Arts in Floyd, VA. She is currently collaborating on the center’s premier fundraising event, the 3rd Annual Live Art Auction with Ken Farmer, to be held on Saturday, July 17. For more information, visit www.jacksonvillecenter.org/art-auction/.