Jerry Gill's Enduring Questions

SURPRISED BY JOY: HERE’S A PUZZLE FROM MY REAL LIFE

Upon reflection, I realize that I spent the first half of my life mostly without experiencing the aesthetic dimension of life. As a kid, I drew some and later listened to jazz and other popular music styles without actively engaging with them. I learned to dance socially in high school. There were no paintings or art objects in the places I grew up, and I was usually asked to “mouth” the words in music and singing classes. My mom took me to lectures, plays, and ball games at the local college, but never to anything musical or to an art museum, a concert, or a gallery. Once I became a college professor, I was exposed to many concerts and plays and enjoyed them, but I did not connect with them emotionally or aesthetically.

When I joined the faculty at Eckerd College, I was about 40 years old and experiencing artists and their creative work firsthand through my colleagues for the first time. When the college reorganized its academic structure, I joined the Creative Arts division because my closest faculty friends and colleagues were there. As a philosopher, I was tasked with overseeing the required interdisciplinary courses for the division. Additionally, since I was familiar with Ingmar Bergman’s films and Greek drama, I was appointed to lead this aspect of our new division. I quickly realized I was out of my depth and decided to spend my upcoming sabbatical studying the arts directly to better connect with students in this field. This marked the true beginning of my aesthetic experience and training.   

I decided to spend the year taking as many courses as I could and actively engaging in the arts. I enrolled in classes like music appreciation, the 19^th-century novel, creative writing, modern dance, figure drawing, and attended symphonies. While I enjoyed all these hands-on arts courses, I showed no talent for any of them. Then I signed up for a series of introductory sculpture classes and discovered my true passion. I had always been captivated by the works of Michelangelo and Henry Moore and was eager to try working with clay and stone. To my surprise, I finally found an art form and medium in which I seemed to have some skill. I took several sculpture classes and created a few decent medium-sized human figures in clay and plaster. I enjoyed it immensely.

My art teacher encouraged me to try working with stone, but I was nervous because I knew that mistakes couldn’t be fixed. Still, she helped me choose a beautiful piece of alabaster about two feet by one foot. I had made a clay model from a Michelangelo drawing to guide me. Being completely new to working with stone, I was scared of making mistakes, so I worked very slowly, turning the stone over whenever I felt I was losing control. As I gradually learned how stone responds to the chisel and hammer, I gained confidence and kept telling myself, “I haven’t ruined it yet.” It took about two months to finish a piece, which both my teacher and I were very proud of. I have continued to work on medium-sized stone sculptures for the past 40 years, creating several passable statues that are now displayed around our backyard. At that time, my college artist friend said, “You could make a living as a sculptor.”  

Now, the challenging puzzle is understanding how this artistic turnaround occurred after so many years of almost complete lack of aesthetic input or output. I cannot fully explain this, but I am very grateful that I somehow discovered an “aesthetic bone” in my body and have learned to enjoy the give-and-take involved in artistic creation. I suspect there has been some physical transfer from my familiarity with my own body through athletic activities over the years, from high school, through college, and beyond. Perhaps a kind of “indwelt” somatic knowledge, tacitly gained over time, is at work here. I can only say that the joy and confidence I experience while sculpting have been a wonderful gift. To borrow the title from C.S. Lewis’ autobiography, I have been “surprised by joy!”