In art, determined teen, dedicated teacher find a world without limits
The classroom is abuzz with a creative energy that is here but not here, as artists absent from this world, lost into their own, hunch over their work.
As so often he is, Ryan Crum is the exception in this senior advanced-placement art class at Easley High School.
He, too, is lost in another universe.
But his gaze is forward, his mouth occupied with the task of grasping a paint brush and stroking it back and forth on the canvas with dexterity surgeons would envy.
It is his only way.
Without the use of any part of his body save for the limited motion of his head, Crum, a 17-year-old quadriplegic, must improvise to have any chance of pursuing his love of art.
The love he had before he was paralyzed in a hunting accident three years ago.
His determination has brought him not only personal fulfillment, but a legitimacy as an artist that he had never before experienced.
Ryan has defied convention.
He has redefined the bounds of how art is taught for the teacher doggedly committed to enabling his student's unique exploration.
And he has inspired the peers around him who are reminded, despite the blithe invincibility of teens, how vulnerable they are.
Ryan not only creates art. He him-self is a work of living art in the way that true art defines human life — the imperfection, the defiance against expectation, the daring, the suffering.
"I got one piece, man, ahhhh … it looks so great," he says in a muted country drawl that speaks to his calm, reflective demeanor.
His assessment of his work, by all accounts, holds true in comparison to the work of more-mobile and even professional artists (he's recently sold one of his original pieces for $5,000).
Nowhere is Ryan's struggle manifested in his art more than in an abstract landscape he aptly named "No Boundaries."
Its visual beauty is magnified by the depth of its context.
In the foreground is a quilted riot of colors, meant in physical terms to be the understory of an open pasture, with Appalachian foothills in the distance.
Ryan not only loves nature, he's obsessed with it.
In his painting, in between the chaos of pigments and the calm of the mountain range beyond, is a line of fence posts.
As he pondered how to add in the fence, Ryan says the meaning of his painting began to find its center.
There is no fence, only the posts, the symbols of the boundaries that could exist, but don't through his unique perspective.
He likes the original, poster-sized version better than the portrait-sized prints. Somehow, Ryan says, the prints hem in the vastness of what he intends for his creation.
An end and a beginning
Dec. 27, 2000.
Ryan recites this date almost robotically, as he would if a DMV clerk were asking his birthdate. In a way, it is — the day he ended one life and began another.
Ryan, then a 14-year-old Easley High freshman, his father, Roger, and a cousin had taken the Wednesday after Christmas to travel just across the Laurens County line into Newberry County for a deer hunt.
Ryan's older brother had piqued his interest in hunting. It seemed to mesh with Ryan's love for the outdoors, though he and his dad weren't terribly experienced at it.
Wearing the orange safety vest required while deer hunting, Ryan split from the group.
About 70 yards away, through thick brush and briars, Ryan's cousin saw movement and fired a shotgun blast.
It was Ryan. A single buckshot pellet pierced through the left side of his neck. His father carried his youngest son 200 yards to his vehicle and got him to Self Memorial Hospital in Greenwood in time to save his life.
The next day Ryan was moved to Greenville Memorial Hospital, and two weeks later, he was transferred to Atlanta's Shepherd Center, a physical therapy clinic that treats catastrophic injuries.
It took Ryan two months to recover enough to simply breathe, speak and move his head, his mother, Tana Crum, says.
While he was still on a ventilator, hospital staff asked him what he was interested in. He told them art.
An integral part of paralysis therapy is engaging patients in hobbies they love to get them on track.
Without a love for something, patients in Ryan's position can get sicker because of a lack of exercise and depression, both of which weaken the immune system, says Susan Skolnic, manager of therapeutic recreation at the Shepherd Center.
Some never come around, Skolnic says; others take to adjusting to their new life almost immediately.
At the Shepherd Center, Roger watched an older man who was also paralyzed fail to get off a respirator. He had lost the will to. He feared his son might suffer the same apathy of spirit.
"I didn't know how he would react," says Roger, 53, a tool and die maker for textile accessories manufacturer Steel Heddle in Greenville. "Some people just draw back into a shell."
But immediately it was clear that Ryan was not ready to draw into any shell. Rather, he wanted to draw on an experience he had dabbled with before. Really, he just wanted to draw.
"I did art, but I didn't take it as seriously," Ryan now says.
It was tough going at first. He was on a ventilator, and his neck had yet to gain the strength necessary to perform even the smallest of tasks.
He was determined.
Breaking new ground
Ryan returned to Easley High and the 1,500-student body his sophomore year — after getting credit for his schooling at the Shepherd Center — unsure of where his path would lead.
The Pickens County school district assigned him a permanent adult "shadow," Sissy Galloway, to help him through school.
He soon met Russell Jewell, his art teacher. By the end of his junior year, Ryan had qualified for Dr. Jewell's advanced-placement art class, a class difficult enough to warrant college credit.
As the weight of such responsibility — teaching a quadriplegic artist at an advanced level — weighed on Jewell's shoulders, he spent the past summer preparing, unsure of what he could possibly do.
Jewell brainstormed. He researched on the Internet. Nothing he found would guide him as to how a paralyzed artist could grow as an artist, rather than as a patient merely using art as therapy.
There was no map to be found. That's when Jewell decided he would figure it out for himself.
On the Google search engine, he typed in "superman." He found the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation and an opportunity to secure a grant for a new art curriculum, with Ryan at its center.
He asked for $800. He got $1,500.
Jewell's classroom is a study in the right-brained artist stereotype, reflecting his personality: somewhat disorganized yet purposeful. All around are signs of a work in progress that is his curriculum for Ryan.
A few strands of crude twine from the ceiling hold up a sheet of foam insulation on which the teacher mounted a hanging drill for Ryan to carve out a piece of Styrofoam.
He mounted an old record turntable sideways and attached a canvas for Ryan to paint with a blow pen. Masking tape holds together much of the invention.
Jewell even set up a paint gun for Ryan to shoot at a canvas, readdressing in a constructive way, he says, Ryan's hunting accident and his general interest in hunting.
And Ryan's art isn't just confined to what he can do with his mouth. Jewell set up a device that attaches to Ryan's wheelchair and allows him to use a paint roller with back and forth motion.
When the device initially proved too light, he tied on a weight.
In 21 years of teaching art, Jewell says he has never been more challenged to find new ways of expression.
"He comes along, and it's looking at art a whole new way," Jewell says.
And so, in that way, Ryan exists in a universe where imagination runs free, without legs, even if that universe is confined to a classroom.
The painting has helped strengthen his neck, but more than that, he says, it provides a release he can't find in anything else. It calms the nerves that often wreak havoc on his body.
"Whenever I'm doing art, it physically relaxes me," he says. "It helps me with my nerve pain."
When painting, Ryan is free. His imagination is limitless, emancipated from his body.
Like Ryan, Jewell says he is free, to invent, to learn, to push past the boundaries that Ryan has already broken through.
"I'm not sure where we're going," Jewell says. "I'm not sure if we're breaking new ground. We're just seeing where we go."
No boundaries
Everything in Ryan's life almost always finds its way to one central idea and love — nature — not only in his landscapes, but in his limited time for activities.
Ryan attends physical therapy after school. It takes him considerable time to get dressed, to eat, to get from class to class. Whenever he gets free time, his mind always wanders back to nature.
Months after the accident, Ryan and his dad were invited by a church friend to attend a hunt, one purpose being to face the past and put it behind them.
Roger agreed to go, but he says he refused to take a gun.
However, Ryan insisted that his father take a gun. It was a hunt after all. So he did. It was Ryan strengthening not only himself but others.
It's also the only time Roger has been hunting since his son's accident.
After relief from the immediate fear over whether his son would live or die, Roger says he has learned to appreciate how his son has handled life since Dec. 27, 2000.
Underneath his gentle, resolved spirit, the burden of a teen living in a bodily prison peeks through.
"It's something you never get used to," Ryan says.
He holds on to the hope, the slim but possible medical odds, that he can one day walk again.
In the meantime, Ryan is slowly and steadily re-integrating his previous life into his current one.
A few weeks ago, he went on a hunt with a group that takes others with similar disabilities. On his next such hunt, he plans to mount a gun that he can fire with his mouth.
His wheelchair, adorned with a brown-based camouflage book bag, has become multipurpose like an SUV, except that he actually uses his vehicle in the wild.
"I take it off-road," he says. "I don't know if you're supposed to, but I do anyway."
Ryan still enjoys his bass boat, and he's planning to take up fishing again with the aid of a special rod.
In his boat, strapped into a five-point harness, he feels the freedom of the breeze in his face, the openness of the water. As he relates this, he would surely stretch out his arms if he could.
His sense of freedom is infectious.
"He is one of the most positive things we have going in this school," says Easley High assistant principal Danny Merck. "We see him leave early for class, he's always got a smile on his face."
When the faculty first saw one of Ryan's paintings, Merck says "everybody wanted it." There is something in the art that speaks to the soul, that calms the ills of a world caught up in achievement.
"At a time when accountability and the stress is getting to the teachers, we just look at those pictures," Merck says.
Ryan's determination and calm acceptance of the cards he has been dealt acts as a spark to everyone around him.
Brittany Morgan, 17, a classmate who has been friends with Ryan since their freshman year, says she remembers a completely different person before the accident.
A more average, typical teenager by those narrowly defined high school standards.
"This has made him one of the most extraordinary people I know," says Morgan, who plans to study biology at the University of South Carolina and minor in art. "He's almost got a completely different outlook on life. He's the center, the core of this class."
Ryan's work and dedication have been a boon to the Easley High art department.
A Greenville mortgage firm that annually buys student artwork has purchased one of Ryan's pieces, "Field of Flowers," for $5,000.
Half of the proceeds will go to the art curriculum, a blessing that Jewell says comes in a time of need as ongoing budget cuts gut programs.
But such things are ancillary to what Ryan provides in spirit, Morgan says.
Even without the context of his life, absent the knowledge of the deep place his work emanates from, Morgan says she believes, like others, that his art stands on its own merits visually.
Like Ryan, she considers herself an artist with expressionistic leanings, an interpreter, one foot in the abstract and the other kept in the real world only out of necessity.
Art is where the two meet on equal grounds, and Ryan, she says, passively teaches her and others around him the hard-fought lessons of life so often overlooked by teens.
"Most of us right now feel like we're invincible," Morgan says.
Ryan is long past accepting that falsity so ingrained into teen life. His father says Ryan "understands his limitations."
Some things are not meant to be. Ryan had long wanted to be a game warden after he graduated from high school. That no longer is practical, he says.
He wants to go to college, but doesn't know which one or what he would study. He's earning a college credit in his class, but he's not sure he could afford to go to college if he wanted to.
The real world is one of limbo, a state of inertia that spreads through every aspect of his life.
Except for one. A world of art where there are no wheelchairs.
Where there are no fences and no boundaries. "In art," he says, "you can just go anywhere."
