Art Is Universal

Esly Escobar found a passion for the visual arts quite by accident, he says. The LTV studios technician and Westhampton Beach resident describes one winter when he literally threw colorful paints on cardboard, and he fell in love.

Before long, he had cleaned up a spot in his basement to serve as a studio and “got lost in it” for years. “I’d forget about everything. I would just go to work, come back, go buy materials,” he said.

The driving passion resulted in him producing over 70 paintings. He soon found himself with a solo show at the Remsenburg Academy, before moving on to explore sculpture and having his work included in the permanent collection at the Parrish Art Museum. “It’s amazing how things happen,” he said.

There’s a magic to creativity and to making art. But the first step to fostering the passion, Escobar discovered, is in simply the doing — making art for art’s sake and seeing what feels right. It doesn’t have to be good at first, but it should elicit an emotional response in the creator before it can do so in the connoisseur. And that’s a lesson Escobar is trying to instill in about 100 fourth- and fifth-graders in his native Guatemala.

Every year, for the past few years, Escobar loads up with art supplies and heads back home to offer art classes to the kids, hoping to light creative sparks and breed a new generation of artists. It’s a noble endeavor. And perhaps a little costly when it comes to providing art supplies for 100 kids — everything from sketch pads to crayons and markers to modeling clay.

Escobar has set up an Amazon wish list, where anyone can buy some of the supplies and have them shipped to Escobar in time for his next trip in March. It’s a great way to not only share the expense but to, in a small way, include the community in the endeavor. Anyone can pitch in for the cost of a set of paintbrushes or colored pencils, and know they’ve helped a budding artist, who may turn out to be the next Monet or Warhol.

In a time when there seems to so much division in the world, based on language, culture and politics, small steps like donating art supplies or teaching a class to young kids 2,000 miles away, goes a long way to bridge those divides.

The lessons being taught are so much greater than how to put color on a page, or how to shape a small sculpture with clay. The overarching lesson is that art is universal, and it can foster a passion — to create, but also to lend a hand — that unites us all and demonstrates that it is, in fact, a small world after all.