Creativity

With the opportunity to work with students again in a teaching role, I was a little taken aback the other day when the students selected the activity of the day to be painting canvases. While creativity is something I feel should be strongly encouraged, I am not a very astute visual artist.

It turns out, my students decided we would paint ceiling tiles from our learning space rather than canvases (for better or worse). Whatever I painted would exist for an eternity in that 24 hour accessed space at my University. We had less than an hour to visualize and create our new piece of art.

The students in the class are mostly seniors and I was honestly impressed at their skills to take an uneven surfaced tile and create beautiful sunsets, water scenes, trees, school logos, modern art, and more. It was awesome. This is my creation:

Feel free to interpret.

I will say that I did better than I thought I would in many ways, and it does actually have meaning. I liked the idea of painting a ceiling tile, it allowed for texture that I couldn't create on my own.

Future students, grads, staff and more will walk into that room and see the tiles created by this class. I suspect many of the other tiles will stand out, as it should be. I'm just glad that I am not embarrassed that mine will be among the others staring down at everyone in the room. Perhaps at just the right time, the right person will look up, and see that "hope" is staring down at them.