Special Ed Drawing

Probably the most outstanding artistic experience I have had as a substitute teacher's aide for Special Education children took place when I was closely monitoring a boy of about 13 years of age who can not talk but who can follow some simple directions, walk, eat and generally take care of himself.

One iof the main academic goals for this child is to get him to write his own name in block letters--a skill which he cannot do though I helped him practice for perhaps fifteen minutes every morning for several months.

I accidentally discovered something artistic which he could do however and which delighted him to do.

If I would place a sheet of paper on his desk, he would draw one long line down the middle of the page and then decorate the page with small dashes of lines on both sides of the central line. He never tired of this exercise and I enjoyed helping him do it.When he would cover a page with little dashes, I would place another sheet of paper in front of him and he would start all over again with the central line and the dashes. To make it more artistic, I would put down colored paper and change the color of his felt-tip pen for variety, but he never tired of doing it.

Of course, since he could not talk and seemed ,to live mainly in his own world, I could not guess the meaning of his drawing.

This compulsive behavior is not so very odd, for an artist, by the way.

I have recently looked into some of the paintings by the famous Spanish painter, Juan Miro, who made  name for himself painting basically the same bizarre symbolic paintings for most of his very long career. He loved to include a stylized ladder, for example, in many of his paintings and painted it again and again and again from his earliest drawings to his last works as an old man.

The artist.

His work.

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