Rocket to the Moon

 

It was the first time I realized I could create something beautiful.  

In elementary school the world was full of mystery and there was nothing more mysterious to me than the ability of people to create something beautiful.  I was thinking mostly about music and the visual arts at the time as I was not yet able to read well enough to grasp what might be beautiful in literature.  This stirring inside was new to my growing awareness of the world.

To hear someone play something beautifully or create a piece of art with their very hands was nothing short of miraculous to me.  My immature brain could not comprehend the time and effort that lay behind those abilities, only that I saw them fully formed and naively believed it must simply be something innate to that person.  The possibility of sustained attention and self-discipline was a black box to me.  My failings at both in a classroom setting was a perennial problem and oftentimes the focus of parent-teacher meetings.

Until that day in art class when I made something I couldn’t explain.  

We were working with clay to fashion sculptures that would be painted and then fired in a kiln.  I chose to make a disk shaped moonscape with a rocket ship.  I was sitting at a table with another boy who was known to be a bit of a pill and was always looking to turn everything into a competition.  He decided to make his version of the same thing which may or may not have been his attempt to annoy me.

I flattened out the clay and formed it into a thick disk about four inches across that looked like a pancake but was tapered at the edges.  Pushing my thumb into it I made a few deep impressions and formed up low thin walls around their edges to create craters.  Next I rolled some clay into a boulder or two to disperse amongst the three craters.  Unsurprisingly the boy at my table was following suit.

Next was the rocket ship which I made by rolling the clay into a fine spire pointing skyward which bulged out in the middle as it descended and then tapered again at the bottom.  Then I fashioned three curving fins that came out from the rocket’s body and formed a tripod where they met the moon’s surface.  I placed the ship off-center next to the biggest crater.  It was a kind of rule-of-thirds placement that was more intuition than any knowledge of aesthetics.

The next step was to paint it.  

I looked over to check on my neighbor’s progress and his rocket was thicker than mine with a cylindrical shape which had a nubby point, like a fat crayon.  The fins were not curved but thick triangles.  He quickly painted his with a dark muddy gray for the moon’s surface, blue for the rocket’s body, and red for the fins.

I was more deliberate in my thought process and came to the conclusion if I only clear-glazed the moon’s surface and didn’t use a color the firing process would give me a more accurate lunar-like shading and texture.  The rocket itself was painted a uniform silver-gray in the classic Bradbury style.  I carefully transferred the slender rocket-on-moonscape into the kiln and enquired of the teacher how long it would take to fire it and get it back.  She said it wouldn’t be that day and class didn’t meet again for another few days besides.

I thought about that sculpture in the meantime and how it might turn out.  I was excited because I was really pleased with how it had all come together regardless of my neighbor’s boorish attempts to copy it.

When the day finally came and my art teacher placed the sculpture on the table in front of me I couldn’t quite believe my eyes.  The fired glaze gave the rocket ship a rich shiny glow and the unpainted moon color was spot on.  It was beautiful!  The art teacher gave me a little grin and said it was “pretty good”.  I couldn’t quite grasp the fact that I’d made it with my very hands and had sustained such laser-like focus throughout the process.  I guess you could say I was “over the moon”.

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