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"Monets in the Making"
Jinu Koola
Deerfield-Windsor School, Class of 2003
Harvard University, Class of 2007
My house lay asleep as I sat at my desk, quickly jotting down details as they rushed dizzily in and out of my head. On computer paper, I drew a small replication of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies. Beneath my rough sketch, I printed the words, “Monets in the Making, Free Summer Fine Arts Program” in large block letters. I envisioned children from North Chicago finding their voices through art; something denied them due to under-funding and budget-cuts. I sat motionless for a moment, recapturing memories of my childhood art classes and wanting to recreate the impact that those classes had had on me for these students.
My conception of a seven-week program took shape during a whirlwind few weeks filled with finding a location for the classes, contacting the eleven school principles of North Chicago’s District 187, and soliciting donations and funding from nearby art supply stores and local organizations. After countless faxes and phone calls, the words I had scrawled a month earlier had become tangible.
For my first class, I arranged the tables in a semi-circle around a simple still life. One after another eager bodies began to fill the empty chairs. The cellophane-wrapped boxes of color pastels and metallic tubes of watercolors gleamed expectantly on one side of the room. The children, impatient to begin, were immediately bent over their clean sheets of white paper. Soon, they were holding in paint-stained hands rainbows of wet paper as vibrantly colored as the young artists who had created them.
But away from the spilled water and pastel-smeared laughter, one girl sat silently.
“What’s your name?”
She stared defiantly at me, her dark eyes searching my face.
“I’m Jinu.”
“Rochelle.” She spoke without lifting her jaw from the cup of her hand.
“Okay Rochelle, what do you want to try?” I asked, motioning towards the table of supplies.
“That.” She pointed a red fingernail at the last box of color pastels.
Rochelle took a pastel from the molded white plastic case and began to scribble purposefully on her paper. She layered each color without discrimination, red mingling with yellow to make orange, blue spilling into red to create purple.
“What’re you drawing? A rainbow?”
She shook her head and lifted the black pastel out of the box. With her small arm moving violently from side to side, she covered her radiant, multi-colored creation with a thick, waxy layer of black, which drowned the paper like tar. I stood frozen, unable to stop her from her destruction.
When there was no more discernable color, she looked up at me, smiling, “See?”
“See what, Rochelle? You just covered your whole paper with black. Now you can’t see any of the colors anymore. No one will ever know what’s underneath.”
She took the tip of her fingernail and scratched some of the black away, revealing a sharp streak of magenta, and green, and yellow. “No, it’s still there. If you scratch the surface a little, you can see it.”
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