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An Artist and the City
"I’m a junior who loves to draw and wanted to get out of the suburbs and try something new."
By Jena Steinbach
It’s almost 1pm on a Saturday and the place is packed with kids. Students with big black portfolios crowd on the concrete pavement in front of the school, talking on their cell phones, greeting friends, smoking cigarettes. Maybe it’s the cigarette smoke, but just outside those heavy school doors, it really smells like a city. At 12:59 the students flick their cigarettes onto the pavement and go inside. Weekend high school classes are about to start at the Moore College of Art.
Like the others, I have a black portfolio in my hand, but that’s just about the only thing I seem to have in common with these kids. I’m wearing my new Joe Jeans and a blue Juicy Couture hoodie. Most of the other students are dressed in black, except for a few sporting eccentric outfits and accessories.
They have piercings all over their faces, and color their hair sky blue, jet-black,
blinding orange. Their baggy overalls are covered in paint and charcoal. They walk around with scowling faces and headphones hanging loosely around their necks. They move like they have all the time in the world, like they have no worries. They’re punks. They’re artists. I don’t fit in.
My drawing class is made up of twelve girls and two boys. They’re all high school seniors, preparing their portfolios in order to apply to art schools in the fall. I’m a junior who loves to draw and wanted to get out of the suburbs and try something new. This is definitely new.
Among the many girls in the class, I have made friends with the five who sit at my table. Unlike the other kids who work with headphones over their ears, these girls are talkative, funny, and interesting. The room is almost silent except for the voices at my table. But these girls are different from me, and there’s no hiding it.
All five of them are from the Northeast and go to Catholic schools.
They tell me about their girlfriends who are mothers, their girlfriends who were almost mothers but had abortions, their boyfriends that are too old for them, and their parents who aren’t home. They show me their tattoos. They talk with thick Philly accents about their jobs. Mostly I just listen, trying to disguise my shock and surprise by acting calm and unemotional. But this is not an easy task for me. I’m not like these girls, and before I came to Moore, I never had friends like them. I never had friends who’ve had babies, or abortions, or two jobs. Most of my friends drive their own cars and have private SAT tutors.
But at Moore, in the midst of urban Philadelphia, it doesn’t matter that I have more money than they do, or that I go to a private school, or that I’m not planning on becoming a mother any time soon. Something about being away from my home in the suburbs and taking an art class in the city, with new people, doesn’t allow stereotypes and social barriers to exist. They just break down. Instead of recognizing the prejudices and differences between us, we focus on our art. We enjoy each other’s company because we all enjoy art, and we choose to enjoy it together. We see each other not by where we live, what we have done, or how we dress, but rather, as artists, something we all respect.
As artists, we spend hours in class staring at leaves and rocks and twigs, trying to capture their natural beauty on paper. We focus on these objects until we eventually scratch, scribble, and skim our papers with thick black charcoal and dark red kanti, trying to capture the natural essence of what we see. We stare at these leaves, these rocks, these twigs, and try to find every crack, every color, every imperfection. And in this way, for us, nature becomes art.
After three hours of drawing, we put our natural objects into a storage box and our masterpieces in our black portfolios. We wash our hands together in big white sinks, scrubbing hard at our charcoal-stained fingers until the black mess is gone. The girls rearrange their tight ponytails and cheap, metal hair clips. I pull on my red Banana Republic coat, black cashmere gloves, and fitted Puma beanie. We push open the heavy metal doors and walk outside, out into the busy city and the smell of cigarettes. We say goodbye to each other until next week’s class.
All five of the girls walk from Moore to Suburban Station and take the train home together. They go back to their lives in the Northeast, back to their friends with babies, their multiple jobs, and their seemingly empty, parentless houses. I get in my shiny, tan Land Rover and drive back to my three-story house in the suburbs. And every time I drive home I can’t help but think I’m going back to a world where all the girls will admire my new Joe Jeans, compliment my cute Puma beanie, and ask me where I bought my cashmere gloves. I think about my new Coach bag, and that it will help me blend in with my friends, so as not to stand out. And there is something about that I don’t like anymore.
- Jena Steinbach is 16 years old and attends Abington Friends School in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania.
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