Nerves subside as students' right brains take over

Making her first visit to the county's Youth Intervention Center, Cindy Moyer worked on calming her jitters.

A Hempfield School District retiree, slender, white-haired and vivacious, Moyer taught art for 35 years and encountered every kind of student.

But passing through a metal detector and heavy-duty doors, following an escort along the bright corridors and unpacking her materials in the one-room library, she worried about connecting with the detainees she had come to teach.

Would they be unruly or unreachable? Would they live up to all those labels — misfit, troublemaker, punk — society slaps them with.

"I braced myself," Moyer admitted later.

In the corridor, a detention center staffer escorted five boys in single file to the art lesson.

The five, ages 13 to 17, were uniformly dressed in loose-fitting orange tops, blue sweats and orange socks. They wore no shoes.

All the boys looked subdued, resigned. For a couple of them, YIC had been home for going on four months.

"One," the first boy in line said on entering the library. "Two," said the next in line. "Three … four … five."

Creativity gap

School is a given at YIC. Detainees study math and English, exercise in the gym and tend a vegetable garden. Art was a gap that Bryan Hubbard, YIC's program coordinator, long tried to fill.

His luck improved when Roberta Little, an artist and grandmotherly dynamo, got the idea for ArtSmart. She thought delinquents might benefit from exposure to art and, unaware of Hubbard's need, called him last December.

Thrilled, Hubbard asked, "Can you start next week?"

Well, Little needed to recruit artists and raise money. It was a big job, but finally last week ArtSmart came to YIC.

Bill Myers, an artist from Ocean Springs, Miss., set up in the multipurpose room. Assisted by Little, he gave the youth paint brushes and directed them on creating a busy eye-popping mural on three sets of bifold doors.

Meanwhile, Moyer worked at a big table in the library. Her project involved paper and felt-tip pens, and she asked the boys to look at their index fingers and draw them.

After a couple of minutes, she asked them to count the number of times they had lifted their pens to start a new line. Most boys counted well past 20.

"With every line you drew," Moyer said, "your left brain (the center of logic, rules and language) is saying, 'Put the pen down. Check what you're doing. You're making mistakes.' Did you hear that little voice? Your left brain is making judgments."

Tapping serenity

Moyer next gave each boy a self-standing self-portrait mirror to gaze into, and she engaged them in an exercise of contour drawing, or drawing without lifting the pen from the paper.

Look into the mirror, Moyer instructed them. With one continuous never-overlapping line, draw what your see.

"Your left brain is not going to like this," she warned. "Tell it to take a break. See if it will allow the right brain (the center of feelings and creativity) to take over. Relax. Go slow. There's no judgment. Everything flows."

The boys' first try warmed them up. Then, on a fresh sheet they started anew, letting their hands follow their eyes. For 10 minutes they worked almost without a word, absorbed, on task.

When time ran out, a 15-year-old said, "I still want to do some more."

"Yes, this is just a beginning," Moyer said, pleased.

"OK, line up," the YIC staffer said. The boys fell into line and filed out.

"One … two … three …"

E-mail: jhawkes@lnpnews.com