The Subconscious Artist

            I wish that all of you could have spent some time with our Artist in Residence, Tim Christensen (class of 1987), over the past two weeks. Along with Raegan Russell, he created not only an engaging artistic experience in the classrooms but also a community art project that will be completed in honor of our 225^th celebration this coming fall. Community members are being invited to engage in his preferred medium of “sgraffito” in carving individual clay discs. Ultimately, these discs will form a constellation-like mobile that will hang on campus next year. While I am excited about all of that, I was more excited about the ninety minutes I spent with him carving my disc.

            Let me state the obvious in saying I am not much of a visual artist. Tim prepped me for the experience by asking me to think about the emotion I feel about Berwick when I come to work each day or leave at night. Without even thinking about the task at hand, I was asked to reflect upon an emotion. Then, rather than illustrate a picture, I was told to make a mark. And then another mark. And then to simply continue until my disc was complete. He said that there was a conscious artist and a subconscious artist in each of us, and the subconscious one was far more powerful. I asked him if people were putting their names on their discs. The answer was no, but that the students he had worked with believed that when they came back to Berwick fifty years from now, they would know which one was theirs.

            And so my ninety minutes began. I never do anything for ninety minutes on this campus. I was struck by the precision of lines I could construct by scraping clay from my disc. I found myself mesmerized by the physicality of the experience and was almost in a bit of a trance. My emotion was a flowing line, like my roller coaster of experience at work that ebbed and flowed. Each rise in the line was intentionally higher than the last valley, ultimately ending at the center of the disc. All of my lines seemed to build towards the same destination with some kind of centrifugal magnetism. I did not have a plan – it just started happening.

            But my zen-like moment was not the best part. The best part was that after ten or fifteen minutes of silence, Tim sat next to me with one of his pots and started scratching on his own. He talked to me about his experience as a student when his mother was a teacher here. He expressed that this kind of communal art exercise would never have happened in his day, and that our students reflect an amazing amount of emotional safety on campus now. He said that as much as he enjoyed his time at Berwick as a student, he loved the school even more today. We talked about the challenges of fatherhood and the stresses of work. We just kept scratching, never made eye contact, and had a human connection that was more textured than I have had in quite some time.

            

I am looking forward to seeing the sculpture next fall.