My Art Teachers Over the Years

I like to think of myself as an essentially self-taught artist, but when I get right down to it, this really isn't strictly true.

My first art teacher was probably my father.  He had a sign shop which he'd inherited from his father next to the house where both he and I grew up.  There I learned how to use knives and chisels to shape wood, how to prime and paint and letter a board, and all the basic wood shop skills I still have to this day, even if I currently lack the space and the equipment. 

My father hated making signs.  In his heart, he was a sculptor.  I remember as a child there was a dragon named Helga he'd carved which people came from all around to gawk at.  Helga was maybe 36 inches of graceful neck on which perched a regal head.  She was carved from a single block of wood and mounted just below the peak of the wood shop which sat just next to the road. Her tongue was long and forked, peeking out just inches past her deadly teeth, but went 12 inches down her throat, as perfectly carved as the ridges of her esophagus- again- all one single block of wood. She was horned and armoured and lacquered and simply majestic.  She wore a gold-leafed collar and much as you could imagine her cutting the fog at the prow of  a proud viking vessel, so did she make one feel safe knowing she was watching out for us down that long road out of town.

 My father is at once one of the most scattered and yet at the same time meticulous people I've ever met other than myself (and as I'm learning, my son).  All my earliest ideas about how and what and why to paint came directly from him, and many of them linger to this day. 

The piece to the left here hung in our living room for the entirety of my childhood.  Actually it still hangs in this exact spot even now, all these years later, long after my father left us, in the same living room where my mother still watches TV. It's one of his earlier sculptures, from what I understand.  I've never gotten a straight answer from him about who the subject of this one is.

The simple composition, the attention to detail, and the mysteriousness of the whole thing (there's no obvious narrative here, but yet still a distinct sense that something's going on we can't see) have all become part of my own work.

In some ways, I'll probably always idolize (read: idealize) his work in my own mind for the simple fact of its patient virtuosity.  Whether you liked his art or not, if you saw him in the shop literally sweating and sometimes bleeding into these things, you'd probably feel much as I do about his sincerity in purpose and unblinking focus on the task.  This has been both an ideal to which I've aspired and a burden I've sought to unload at various points in my life.  My father has always represented to me the ancient and the traditional, and these are things against which I think it's natural to rebel but difficult to avoid respecting.

In elementary school, I had a really amazing art teacher named Mrs. Douglas.  From kindergarten through fourth grade, she and I met once a week and I got to do pretty much whatever I wanted.  I loved that place.  Here's a link to an article I found which she wrote which describes how her classroom functioned.  Check it out.  In Mrs. Douglas' class, I was presented for the first time with a safe and consistent place to experiment with various media.  I don't recall there ever being assignments so much as demonstrations which could then be utilized or ignored as I saw fit. 

While at home my father would look over my shoulder and tell me either how to draw what I was drawing better (more like he would draw it), or why I shouldn't be drawing what I was drawing (monsters and demons were not the sort of thing I was supposed to think about), at school Mrs, Douglas would look over my shoulder and ask me if there was anything I needed at hand to make what I was thinking.  Under her tutelage the seed of my rebellion was planted.

In middle school, from the ages of 10 to 13, I had a new art teacher, Mr. Anderson, who was a fucking idiot and had no business whatsoever teaching children anything, art the very least of all.  He would stand up at the front of the class next to an overhead projector and draw animals.  We would be graded based on how well we duplicated his drawings, and then he would hang up everyone's drawings in order from best to worst.  During this time, I started to hate art.  I knew it was a part of me I could not sever though, so I suffered through middle school hoping high school would be better.

And it was.  By the time I was in high school, my father was long gone, living in the hills of New Hampshire, so I was free at home to paint and draw what I wanted, but most of what I did was in Mrs. Weyand's classroom at school.  She taught me how to stretch and gesso a canvas and gave me more and more freedom over the years to pursue my work in private.  A sort of unspoken agreement was reached in which I would complete my assigned work in record speed to demonstrate I'd understood whatever underlying principle was being taught, and was then given free rein to create additional work of my own from materials in the classroom. 

My junior year of high school however, Mrs. Weyand and I, after having become something like friends, had a major falling out.  I had built an extra-credit bong out of clay, cleverly disguised as a monkey-faced Neptune candleholder.  I intended it as a gift for a friend of mine who lived in New Hampshire with his mom with whom my dad had been shacked up at that point for a couple of years, but when Mrs. Weyand saw me packing it up to bring home for what was probably Christmas vacation, she told me that she wanted to put the piece in the annual high school art show at the public library.  I told her the piece was promised as a gift to a friend and that since I could only see him a couple times a year, I needed it now. She informed me that because the work was made of materials purchased by the school, and fired in the school's kiln that it was still the property of the school and therefore I had no choice.  I unpacked it and stalked out of there in a huff to eat my lunch.  I spent most of my time in school in the art room though, and I knew her schedule as well as I knew my own.  So I went back there while she was at lunch and the art room was being watched over by a teacher's aide.  I was often in the art room for independent work time, so it was not unusual to see me walk in and box up the piece.  I knew I couldn't hide it in my locker if Mrs. Weyand came looking for it so I went up to the office and asked them to hold onto it for me.  Half an hour later as I sat down in my social studies class she stormed in demanding to know where the sculpture was.  I told her it was beyond her reach and she couldn't have it.  I told her it ceased being the property of the school as soon as I completed it and my copyright took effect.  I told her that even were that not the case, she'd never find it anyway so she'd best forget about it.  She never forgave me, and we were no longer friendly. 

My senior year, the school enacted a new scheduling system and Mrs. Weyand left.  We had a new art teacher, Mrs. Barnes, who allowed me the same level of access Mrs. Weyand once had, and since I was an AP Art student which under the new schedule gave me about 3 hours of self-directed time in the art room, I was able to make whatever I wanted.  The idea was that I was supposed to compile a portfolio to submit to art schools.  Instead, I took that opportunity to make whatever I felt like making.  I'd often come into school, go to the art room, draw something in pastels so I'd have an excuse to go outside to spray it with fixative and therefore have the privacy required to smoke a little pot.  Then I'd go back up the classroom stoned as hell and paint demons in boxes or crying people, usually.

I never put together a real portfolio, so I wasn't able to apply to any real art schools.  I have a penchant for shooting myself in the foot.  I was somehow accepted into Bridgewater State College though, and enrolled as a Fine Arts major.  Through a mistake in the printing of the course selection books my first year there, I was able to get into a painting class and a 2D design class despite not having the prerequisite drawing class under my belt.  I took both of those classes with Professor William Kendall, who I think can perhaps lay claim (if ever it becomes the sort of thing to which anyone would wish to lay such a claim) for being the single most influential person in the formation of my artistic identity.

Dr. Kendall and I had a rather contentious relationship based on a mutual respect.  He would assign complicated projects with a great many specific elements he said would be required to demonstrate understanding of a particular concept.  I would then create a piece in which I had done exactly the opposite thing in the case of each and every single specific required element while still demonstrating I understood the underlying concepts. 

The painting to the left here is a perfect example of this relationship.  His assignment was to paint a group of simple biomorphic objects from life in earthtones and greys arranged in a line on a horizontal surface, building up layers of colour using the impasto techniques of some old Italian master or something.  I instead painted a single biomorphic object from my imagination in bright and contrasting colours sitting in an impossible space on a vertical canvas, but still using the impasto technique at the core of the lesson.  This one is called "Bowling Ball Smashing the Unsmashable Bottle in Three Prophetic Flashes of Memory, and an Afterthought."  I got the only A in the class for this project.

Once the administration realized they'd accidentally allowed me to skip over taking a drawing class, they forced me to do so before they'd let me take Painting II.  After 2 weeks in that class, I dropped out of school altogether.  I was like FUCK THIS SHIT.  And I was out.  Done.  They wanted me to sit and draw the same object like 50 times in a row.  No constructive criticism.  Too big a class.  Looks of derision from the professor who seemed to assume I was just another loser taking the required art course with no intention of being an artist.  I couldn't take it.  I had to leave.

Officially, that's when my self-education began, and so the story might end there, but there are two other people I feel require mention here.  The first is Danielle De Feo, who was my girlfriend for a couple of years.  The photo to the left is of her hands as works on an installation piece at my apartment at the time called Hypergraphia, which was about her near-compulsive need to write constantly.  We covered the walls with black cloth which she then took about a week to cover entirely in text taken from her writings over the previous year or so- everything from IM messages to her graduate course work to poetry in Chinese.

Danielle challenged me constantly to maintain a mindfulness of meaning in my work.  Living together for some time, we discussed the nature of art almost daily it seems now.  At the time I was insistent that my work in its purest form had no meaning other than as an imprint of my state of mind.  Danielle forced me to look deeper and find more. 

Finally, I want to mention Michael Costello.  Michael is a very talented and well established painter working in South Boston.  A few years ago I started modeling for artists around the city and eventually found myself working with Michael very regularly. We got along quite well and I enjoyed his work immensely.  Michael didn't teach me anything about how or why or what to paint.  What Michael taught me in our short time was how to be an artist.   Michael showed me a life and a lifestyle built around his art and supported by it.  I learned from him the importance of relationships.  Relationships with the audience, with galleries, and with other artists.  I also learned from Michael that if I ever want to make my art the driving force in my life I need at some point to take a risk or two if necessary and just do it.

These have been my art teachers.  I still have much to learn (and unlearn) but I will.  There is always a new teacher.