Art, Running, and Life

The three-year-old closed her eyes. She jumped.

 

In an instant, the bluish, chlorinated water of the deep end began to envelop her. She gazed quickly at the bottom just beneath her feet, then squinted through the ripples at the lifeguard stand and startled onlookers, so close but a million miles away. What now? she wondered. She was getting scared.

 

Grab the side of the pool, her instincts told her. Oh, no, there’s nothing to hold onto. Just take a breath. That’s what I’ll do. After all, mermaids can breathe under water. I can too.

 

Then, she exhaled. She saw a bubble rise to the surface.

“The next thing I remember, I was in the hospital,” recalled Izzy LeBey, a Collegiate School senior, of that transcendent moment that remains, 15 years later, indelible in her consciousness. “My parents looked upset. That’s when I knew something must be wrong.”

 

After that Easter Weekend incident at the Farmington Country Club in Charlottesville, an ambulance ride to the University of Virginia Medical Center, and an overnight stay, Izzy headed home to Richmond with her very relieved and grateful family.

 

As she attempted to make sense of her experience, she found comfort in drawing. Pencil in hand, she began to sketch mermaids. Many mermaids.

 

“I used art as a way to get my emotions out,” Izzy explained. “I have a binder still with literally hundreds and hundreds of mermaid drawings.”

 

As she drew, a gift was revealing itself, not just through the artwork she was creating but in the coping mechanism she was developing.       

 

“In fourth grade, I got in trouble for something,” she said. “I don’t remember what it was. I just remember sitting there waiting to talk to the teacher. I was nervous. I pulled out a piece of paper and started drawing a mermaid. Afterwards, I was so calm. I thought, Why did I just do that? Then I realized, OK, I’ve always done this. I’d never put the pieces together that when I felt bad, I’d draw.”

 

Conveying her thoughts, insights, and feelings through art has become her passion.

 

“Izzy is a true intellect, meaning that she searches for the truth in many different areas,” said Pam Sutherland, her honors art teacher. “She has a philosophical bent to what she does. She’s interested in expressing a true sense of the emotion that underscores everything that she makes.”

 

Since she started school, Izzy has always taken art classes, first at St. Catherine’s and later at Collegiate where she transferred as a junior in the fall of 2016.

 

“Last year, I started to concentrate on the emotional motivations of my work,” she said. “That’s really evolved in honors art because we’ve had so much freedom. The prompts Mrs. Sutherland gives us aren’t project-based. They’re more conceptual, which I like.”

At the recent Art Walk, the annual showcase of Collegiate’s K-12 visual arts program, Izzy displayed an installation of nine of her creations.

 

One, entitled Surfacing, portrays a present-day Izzy, clinging to the edge of a pool.

 

“In this piece, my head is above the water,” she said. “I can see everything more clearly than when I’m under the water and my vision’s blurry. That’s symbolic. Now, of course, I can see all the good that came out of something as traumatic as the near-drowning incident.”

 

If you could display only one piece of artwork, I asked her, which would it be?

 

“The recent piece called Reflections,” she responded. “It ties everything together for me. I didn’t make it with a plan in mind, which is what I normally do. It has an orb of water in the middle which represents time. I put flowers in the middle because flowers are all around you, but you sometimes don’t notice them unless you really pay attention to how beautiful they are. Water can distill that. I filled the back up with gold because I wanted a person to be able to stand in front and have light reflect back like it would if you were looking at something up close like the flowers and a little orb of water.”

 

Her meticulously crafted poem, also entitled “Reflections,“ accompanies the painting.

 

“It’s about the beauty you can find in memory as you lose touch with your surroundings,” she explained. “It’s written from the perspective of an older person who’s losing touch with hearing and smell and the other senses which connect you to the present. The poem is connected to my near-drowning incident that gets fuzzier as I get older.”

 

Just as Izzy has found joy and fulfillment through her aesthetic endeavors, likewise she’s found meaning in the athletic arena.

 

“I started running in fifth grade,” she said. “I remember going to Fork Union to see my older sister Kathryn run (for St. Catherine’s) and thought, I can do that.”

 

Two years later, Izzy joined the cross country and track teams at St. Catherine’s and in the ensuing years began to make her mark. She’s recorded personal bests of 2:22.79 in the 800, 5:11.37 in the 1600, 11:37.47 in the 3200, and 19:27 in the 5K (on the cross country course at Pole Green Park). This past Saturday in the League of Independent Schools championship meet, she ran the leadoff leg for the victorious 4x800 relay team, placed second in the 800, then returned 35 minutes later and won the 3200 on a 95-degree afternoon. During her career, she earned multiple All-VISAA and All-LIS citations.

“Running feels so natural to me,” she said. “It’s hard to imagine my life without running. There’s such a difference in my mind between competition and the long, easy runs. I love them both equally. For the long runs, I feel like I notice more. I can go on any route I want. I can let my mind wander. Then I come back to my normal routine.”  

 

Just as an artist can drift into a world unencumbered by time, outside stimuli, or sometimes even conscious thought, likewise a runner can become lost in the effort and slip into that euphoric state called “the zone.”

 

“That equates more to the competitive aspect of running than to the long runs,” Izzy said. “It’s funny because you don’t notice what’s going on around you when you’re in a race. I’ve finished a race and people told me, ‘Yeah, I cheered for you,’ but I had no idea. It’s almost like I’m going into a trance when I’m drawing. I concentrate on something so intensely, and I just don’t stop until I’m done. I’ll work on a drawing for five hours and won’t even realize it. It’s like when you lock into the race.”

 

Runners have limits, of course, reflected not so much by heart and mind but by age, wear and tear, and, ultimately, the stop watch. They eventually peak. They achieve their lifetime bests.

Does an artist reach that pinnacle in a realm quite unquantifiable? I asked Izzy. Once you’ve achieved mastery, can you improve or, at the least, maintain that edge? And, if so, how?

 

“Never stay stagnant,” she replied. “I was talking to Mrs. Sutherland the other day about the (1889) Oscar Wilde essay ‘The Decay of Lying.’ He said, ‘Life imitates Art more so than Art imitates Life.’ Everything in your life comes into your art. As soon as you separate it, it becomes stagnant, and you do the same thing over and over again. One thing I’ve learned about running is to find joy in the process of a workout. A workout isn’t just preparation for a race. It’s training your mind so you’ll be able to meet any challenge with the same mental toughness with which you met the workout.”

    -- Weldon Bradshaw