PHOTO ESSAY
When I Was in School
A collection of painted artworks
Whenever I get back to my parents I always spend a few hours here or there going through old clothes, paperwork, or other things I’ve collected over the years. And while I’m far from being a minimalist, I always end up throwing stuff away. Stuff I know I won’t need or miss when it’s gone.
Today I found a mystery box when bringing bags to the attic. I say mystery because it had a tag on it “Anne shoes” but the box was too heavy for shoes.
Carrying it downstairs and opening the box I found exercise books, notebooks, and worksheets from school. Spread across from grades 1 to 12 there were a lot of different topics covered.
While I did decide to throw most of them away, I also brought my camera to save some of the pieces in a digital version.
The one thing that stood out to me all across the subjects was my joy in decorating pages. If it was English, geography, French or the history book, I painted in all of them.
Some projects were surely art projects.
But some were just meant to decorate a page. Like here. We were learning a letter combination in English and I created a double page showcasing two beautiful birds.
Budgies.
Looking at this page right now I do admit I had to Google the translation. Never heard the word I’d say but that is clearly a lie.
The next page must be from the biology book. I was learning about birds and the underground world. Where rabbits, mice, and snails do live. I even got a compliment for it from my teacher.
Animals were a topic I was stuck on for a while and tried my best in painting them.
In another subject, we got to the topic of “wheels”. I wrote down all kinds of vehicles made of wheels and painted a few.
Back then when the internet was still unknown ground, we got pictures and images from newspapers and adverts. We cut them out and glued them into our books.
The one below is from a religion lesson. The question written above says “Where comes the world from?” And once again you can see images cut out from newspapers glued onto the page. That was our only option back then to get to pictures. If we didn’t want to draw them.
I’m heading further through the stack of books and find some German exercise books. Not my favorite topic but while I didn’t succeed in creative writing, I never lacked in decorating the pages.
Below is a drawing I created in geography class with one of my all-time favorite teachers.
A black forest house.
It is described as a house with only one roof. Animals and humans sleep under the same roof.
The same teacher also showed us the world map and taught us about mountains above and underneath the water's surface.
You can also see that teachers had to make the sheets themselves. I can recognize her handwriting. It’s not that they could just Google a topic and print the exercise sheets. They had to draw, write or copy them.
The one below stands out due to the bright colors I used to decorate the poem on the right but on the left, you can see something much more interesting. A selection of different patterns drawn with a lead pencil. Possibly leading to a bigger project.
So yes, I’ve always loved arts and even if it wasn’t always what my teachers wanted to see, I did enjoy decorating my school books.
“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” — Edgar Degas
More about arts:
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