Teachers: Paying Tribute
I spent 30 years teaching art. Most of my waking (and often sleeping) hours during those years were spent thinking about art teaching, figuring out how to be a better teacher, and trying to solve the problems that arose everyday in the classroom.
So it makes sense that at least some of the space in this website is devoted to thanking my teachers, paying tribute to the people who inspired me along the way.
Teaching art is a lot like parenting. In good parenting, you’re supposed to create an environment where the child does something right. Then you notice it, “catch them at it”, help them become aware of it. And so it is marked and remembered, and becomes part of who they are.
Creating this environment is the challenge. In art, what you want to enable and then catch are not moments of “correct” behavior, but those moments of right-ness. Where pleasure, or connectedness, or a sense of flow, are felt. This is surprisingly difficult to do. I thank all of my teachers and coaches for their examples, guidance, and support in helping me learn how to create this atmosphere for myself and my students.
Robert Siegelman
School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA
NewArt, Newton, MA
In Bob’s class, nothing is too crazy, nothing is out of bounds. I feel like a child again — not the carefree, romanticized version of childhood — but the yearning child who hasn’t yet learned to hide the yearning. Things don’t have to make sense or be put together logically.
From Bob, I have learned to see the world larger and smaller, more upright and more skewed, more organized and more disorganized than it really is. With humor, patience, and great kindness, he helps us to become aware of the internal rules we have bound ourselves in with. To slowly untangle the knots that have gotten pulled too tight.
Each week in Bob’s zoom class during covid, I would feel that he had pushed me far enough. But just a few words from him would open a new door and I would walk through.
Image: Carol Ober
Acrylic and charcoal
Tim Hawkesworth and Lala Zeitlin
Art New England, Bennington, Vermont
Tim and Lala teach as a team. Every morning during the intensive Bennington weeks, they walk around the studio and attend to us.
The process of painting a picture is a lot like the trajectory of life. For the lucky ones, it can be easy at the beginning. You’re full of energy and hope. As you age, rules accumulate, burdens, self-doubts. Doors start closing.
It’s so hard to finish a painting. Like closure to a life, you get desperate - to say everything you wanted to say, do everything you wanted to do. But it’s impossible. We are never done. It is never enough. We always want more.
Tim and Lala are like art midwives — and doulas. They are there for us at the beginning. They are there for us as we struggle to find our footing. They are there for us at the end.
Tim says, “As artists, we feel so responsible for saving the painting’s life. But once we let go, we can just be there, just witness.”
A fellow student says, mid-week, “I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know which way is up!”
Tim answers: “Paintings can come in backwards or upside down.” Just “look for the moment where the painting says, ‘I’ll take it from here!’”
Image: Carol Ober
Acrylic and charcoal
Bob Collins
Coming …
Image: Carol Ober
Acrylic and charcoal
Cecil Collins
City Literary Institute, London, England
I had just moved to London in 1978 to study art, to work, and to have an adventure. One day, in a painting class at the Central School of Art and Design, I overheard someone talking about Cecil Collins’ life drawing class at the City Literary Institute. I signed up and Cecil’s class became the centerpoint of my experience in London for 2 years. His class is described beautifully in Ian Hopton’s article, Life Drawing with Cecil Collins.
For the most part, Cecil didn’t talk directly to individual students during class. But one day, after two years, he came over to me and said quietly, “I can see you’ve made contact.” I have never forgotten that. Something, indeed, had recently clicked. The model, the rhythm of the music, the paper, the ink, the drawing instruments, somehow all became part of a whole, connected, when I was drawing. As if I was all of those things at once.
After class each week, Menchu — a Spanish friend I had met in the class — and I would roam around London for hours, going to the National Gallery, the British Museum, the parks. She was a friend of Cecil’s and the three of us went to tea one day after class. All I remember about the conversation is that, at one point, they began talking about twilight and how sad they were when the light started dimming each day. It had never occurred to me to pay attention to the effect of waning light on my mood, but from then on I thought about it often at the end of the day.
Image: Carol Ober
Ink with brush and reed pen
Peter Wey
Art Therapy program, Hertfordshire College of Art and Design, St. Albans, England
Peter Wey was an art therapist in the Art Therapy program at Hertfordshire College of Art and Design. As part of the program, we worked for 2 days a week all year in a shared studio space where we were given art supplies and encouraged to do whatever we wanted. Everyone was motivated on this journey of self-discovery and the room quickly filled up with all of our work.
This was such a welcome relief after the pressures of art school. Peter walked around and talked to us about our work when we needed to talk. Mostly, he listened and reflected back to us what he saw on the paper. By simply observing, with empathy, what was going on in the artwork (“more blue is appearing next to the red, the orange is surrounding the green”, etc.) he helped me to be more curious than worried.
I was able to get inside the painting instead of feeling separate from it, getting caught in my head. It was like learning to ride a bike and finally taking the training wheels off. Not that I wouldn’t have plenty of times of unsteadiness and fear in the future. But from then on, I knew what it felt like to ride without them.
Image: Carol Ober
Tempera paint
Patricia Woodall
Teacher, Chantraine dance method, London, England
Patricia was one of the first people I met when I moved to London in 1978. She taught a wonderful Chantraine dance class, a method of dance and personal growth that had been adopted by the Paris Opera Ballet among other dance companies. She took me under her wing and became a much-needed mentor.
I began to take her dance class every week and then sit in on the following class to draw the moving dancers. For two years, I made dozens of quick sketches each week, having just felt the dance movements in my own body an hour earlier. When anyone was able to put a real passion into their dancing, really connect to the movement and express it, she would say that we had “the sacred fire”.
Image: Carol Ober
Charcoal drawing
Bruce Carter
Carnegie-Mellon University
Bruce Carter was my woodcut printmaking teacher at Carnegie-Mellon. Bruce was a mixture of army sergeant and supportive uncle whose reputation for being tough was balanced by his sensitivity. The first thing we learned about him was that he had fought in the Korean war. He had gone directly from art school, where the focus was on observation and introspection, to the battlefield. His powerful woodcuts — outpourings of his passionate hatred of injustice and violence — were influenced by the German Expressionists. He had also spent time studying woodcut printmaking in Japan and saturated us with images of Japanese Ukiyo-e prints. His deepest praise for a print was to say that it had both delicacy and strength.
Image: Carol Ober
Woodcut
Herbert Olds
Carnegie-Mellon University
Herb Olds was my drawing teacher at Carnegie-Mellon. Warm, supportive, and overflowing with a love of drawing and the exuberance of the mark, he helped us find our own voices.
I would have loved to draw like Herb, but it wasn’t quite me. Although he was a skilled traditional draughtsman and set high standards for us, he didn’t seem to care that I never once got the whole figure onto the page during figure drawing class.
Image: Carol Ober
Charcoal drawing
Douglas Wilson
Carnegie-Mellon University
Douglas Wilson was my design teacher at Carnegie-Mellon. It’s funny what we remember about people. I remember that he would quote his critics who said that he had a good sense of color, but not much to say. Douglas, himself, felt that it was exactly the opposite: that he had a lot to say, but not a great command of color. I guess he was teaching us a bit of irreverence; how to listen to our own voices.
I also remember him telling us that when he fought in the war, he led his troops down the beach and had them pick up seashells. Also, he could hear flowers cry. But most of all, he had a sense of play and delight.
As part of our teacher/student communication, he would write long letters to us, which I have kept over the years. In them, he would talk about our artwork, suggest ideas and artists that might appeal to us, and, in general, muse about art. I had that wonderful sense of being known and understood.
Image: Carol Ober
Lithograph
Gail Davidson
Taylor Allderdice High School, Pittsburgh, PA
Gail Davidson was my high school art teacher. I remember her energy and enthusiasm — and her trust in me. She mostly left me alone to draw my friends in the hallways. When she realized that I was confused about my college plans, she took me by the hand and helped me apply for a Scholastic scholarship that enabled me to go to art school at Carnegie Mellon University.
Image: Carol Ober
Pencil drawing