Art School

I sometimes say that I attended Art School. When I was about 8, my parents signed my siblings and me up for summer kids’ art classes at a local college. I'm pretty sure that counts, right? 

They were planned and taught by college kids.  It was the 60’s, so most of the stuff we worked on was pretty trippy, hippy-ish and sort of out there:  Batik on paper with melted crayons, tie-dye coffee filters and peace-sign dreamcatchers.  One especially sixties-ish project was a candlestick holder – a wine bottle on which we glued bits of cut-out cardboard, covered tight with aluminum foil and burnished with black ink and paint. 

My clearest memory from those classes, however, is when our student teacher left the classroom for a few moments on some now forgotten errand or emergency. No adult was sent in to relieve him.  It was just the students.   I was accustomed to strict catholic school nuns as teachers.  They would put in you the corner for hours if you misbehaved. Or worse: they carried sticks back then and were not afraid to use them.  

 I was delighted with this new-found freedom.  They didn’t diagnose kids then like they do today, but I would most assuredly have been found attention deficit disordered.  My feckless mind immediately turned to what an unsupervised classroom offered me.  I cast a restless eye around and, finding nothing better to do, climbed up and started dancing on my desk.  I was having great time, gyrating around like a spastic eel.  The other kids laughed, which only encouraged me.  

Then a large, red-faced, angry professor put his head in the door and told me to get the hell down.  Startled and red-faced, I scrambled off the desk and sat in my chair, thinking I’d be in a lot of trouble.  He turned and walked away.  I blinked. Wait. Walked away?  I couldn’t believe it!  I needn’t have worried. There were no sticks, no standing in corners. Relief flooded through me. I remember feeling very fortunate and decided to behave myself.

As soon as he went away, some of the other kids ran to the chalkboard to puff erasers together. As I watched the chalk dust rise around them, my newfound “good girl” attitude quickly evaporated. I joined them and we joyfully clapped erasers inside giant white clouds.  

Our hapless teacher returned a short time later.  He soon had us settled down again, happily cutting up pieces of cardboard and gluing them to wine bottles.  Looking back on it, I think I would have hated having me as a student.

Art School was fun, but the only lesson I learned there was that I couldn’t wait to get to college.

Bloomin' Artist

So here I am, starting a blog about art.  I suppose it ought to start with an artist statement of some sort. But artist statements always freak me out a bit.  I have to be honest; when I read other Artists’ Statements I usually come away puzzled and sort of weary; “Aesthetic values”? “En plein air”? “Metaphor of the Middle Class”? It’s like I’ve been to an Art History lecture that I didn’t fully understand.

 I tried to write my own Artist Statement, and it came across as pompous at best, and re-reading it confused even me.

Then I thought I'd just give the facts: I wrote about my education and art training, clear, straight to the point and in order.  And it couldn’t have been more dull.

So now I think that, instead, I’ll just tell my story in a simple “me” way and illustrate my life as an artist. So here goes:

Like most kids, when I was little I adored coloring, drawing and painting, Playdoh, glue, sparkles and scissors. Unfortunately kids’ art supplies weren’t inexpensive back then like they are today.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but we were pretty poor. I remember vividly coveting the 56 pack of crayons with the built-in sharpener belonging to another kid in my first grade class, having only an 8-pack for myself.

 My parents liked art—Dad was a good artist-- and they did try to give my four siblings and me art stuff when they could.  Christmas-time came with new paint-by-numbers, coloring books, and play dough for everyone.  I love the texture of the then-real oil paints in the paint-by numbers, the feel of my little skinny fingers poking around in the Playdoh, and the smoothly satisfying rub of a new crayon on paper.

  But the smells!  The oil paints were rich and heavenly!  Probably inhaling them weren’t  good for my then-developing brain-- and may explain my later diagnosis with MS, but even today the smell of oil paints transports me back to happy days coloring in little numbered spaces with my brothers and sister at our Formica kitchen table. Crayons and Playdoh had their own wonderful, uniquely childlike smells. I’ve never met an adult who didn’t at one time try to eat either a crayon or secretly munch a ball of Playdoh.   Luckily they didn’t taste as good as they smelled.  Though I did hear about a neighbor kid whose mother reported that his poop was regularly bright blue.

It was never long, though, before the paints were gone, the crayons broken, the play dough dried into hard lumps. I drew this first picture imagining what it would be like to have had unlimited art supplies as a kid.
More to follow.