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Living in the moment – with kids and art

By Bella Deutser, age 17 | March 1, 2020

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CREATIVELY SPEAKING Bella Deutser, a junior at The Emery/Weiner School, teaches art to kids and hopes to study art psychology one day.

I’ve always loved working with children. I think it started when I was in eighth grade and began working at The Museum of Fine Arts’ summer camp in Santa Barbara, Calif., where my grandparents live. I would teach kids to draw, paint and collage. We would walk through the museum together, hand in hand, admiring art and the different artists’ techniques.

I have continued teaching every summer at the museum in Santa Barbara, and now, during the school year, I work at Artmix too. Artmix is an art school for young children in Rice Village. I help children with drawing, collage and just generally getting messy! On Sundays, I work at Beth Israel synagogue as a madracha, which means a teacher’s assistant for young children.

Every child I have worked with has had an impact on me, but there was one in particular who sticks with me every day. This last summer, one student spent one week with me at art camp, and her strength and kindness were unforgettable. She had a disease where her bones were very fragile and would break at the slightest impact. She was always either in a wheelchair or on crutches, but that didn't stop her from having fun and making friends. Every day at lunch, she would sit with me and a group of her friends, and I would teach them fun hand games like Down-by-the-Banks. She would always outlast the other kids. One day, she told me how this was one of her favorite weeks of the summer, and it was because of me and my inclusiveness. My heart felt full.

Being with children and art allows me to be completely unselfconscious and to live in the moment. I hope to one day be able to merge my love of both art and children into a career of art psychology, for I believe art truly is therapeutic in a deep way. And in the meantime, I will continue to work to gain more knowledge about children, art, myself and the world around me.

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