One morning after dropping off Matia at her classroom, I’m walking down the hallway of her school and stop to admire a wall full of fantastic sunflower paintings that the grade 3 students had recently painted. My friend Elizabeth brought in fresh sunflowers from her garden a few weeks before and the two wonderful teachers, Janet Watts and Doreen Johnson invited their students to deeply observe these flowers and to create a still life painting from them. They were on 11 x 17” paper, painted in bright colours and mounted on a bright paper backing.
Looking at the paintings in the hallway, I thought, ”These are works of art, each one of them so fantastic, they should be in a gallery. I don’t have an art gallery but I do have a Greek restaurant with many white walls.” So I went to the classroom, asked Janet if I could hang the paintings up at my restaurant and invite the students down for a tour and complimentary lunch. A few weeks later I returned to collect the paintings and took the sunflower paintings back to the restaurant and hung them up on the long white stucco wall in our bright sun-splashed courtyard. We printed up a little description of the project and mounted that on the wall in order for our guests to learn more about where this garden of colour originated.
A few weeks later the school bus pulls up and the grade three students stream in for a visit to our restaurant. We began by assembling in the courtyard and then took some time to simply admire their lovely paintings hanging on our wall. I shared with the students how so many of our guests loved their paintings and how they enjoyed having their meals next to this beautiful wall of lovingly created flower paintings.
We then took a tour of the restaurant from an artists perspective, looking at all the different types of art used to decorate and beautify the building. We looked at the many photographs, the watercolours, the sculptures, the colorful well-worn tapestries, the wooden furniture and antique pieces that filled the mantles and nooks. We examined how my mother brought nature into the restaurant, using Golden Rain Tree branches, sagebrush bushes, delicate birds nests and hornets nests, rough wood tree branches hanging on walls to display the Greek wool blankets folded over them. I wanted them to see that art is all around us, and that their paintings, and their contributions as artists, were part of this larger canvas that the restaurant offered to our guests.
We then sat down at the long wooden tables in the courtyard and ate lunch, enjoying non traditional fare like the Greek olives and feta cheese, the fried baby squid, and the little spanakopitas, (the spinach and cheese pies). On the tables, vases of fresh flowers, and all around the students, on the white courtyard walls, their brilliant, magical sunflower paintings.
After lunch, I brought out my camera and took individual portraits of each artist standing in front of their painting, every student having a moment to proudly take credit for their work, beaming with pride, full of satisfaction, accomplishment and joy. When the prints came back from the photofinishers, I put each student’s portrait in it’s own Theo’s folded greeting card, and hand wrote a short, personalized thank you to each of the students for allowing us to share their art work at our restaurant and with our guests. A few days later, a package arrived in their classroom, with each student receiving a thank you card and a photographic portrait to mark their individual contribution to the classroom’s art exhibit.
I loved enabling this event. I enjoyed using the restaurant as a link between the student’s exploration of art in the classroom and the presentation and integration of their art into the community. I enjoyed them discovering their roles as contributors to a rich, artistic world, a world outside their classroom. I think that through an art project like Elizabeth’s Sunflowers at Theo’s, students can begin a journey where they can examine their connection to themselves and to their world. In this environment, I believe a kind of a trust can grow. Their art, like a bridge, connects them to others while at the same time enables them to experience confidence, pride and excitement at seeing their work on display.
I believe these were Mattering roots, the exploration of making learning matter by bringing it alive. Demonstrating learning’s relevance by integrating a project into my restaurant and by extension part of a wider public space called community. It was a beautiful way for me to learn that, even as a small business owner, a Greek restaurant owner of all things, that I could somehow play a part in enabling rich and meaningful experiences for educators and students in my community.
