I went to a party the other night

and was chatting with another artist, one of those people who has enormous talent and intelligence but not the discipline necessary to produce the work, a common problem, unfortunately. And the amount of time you have to spend alone in order to paint is hard for him. He is thinking about teaching, a good choice for this person, and he started asking me how I teach. A difficult question to answer. It depends a lot upon the class. I told him I try to configure a progression of assignments so there is development in the process. And I focus as much as possible on process, not product. Then he asked me how I was taught, how I learned, basically how come I have the necessary discipline and did everyone in my school work the same, were we taught to mimic a style. I was taught to see how things worked, to get into the process of creativity, the process of making things happen, to think more about how I was working than what I produced and also, no, we did not all work alike. I think differences were respected but there was definitely the development of a self-critical eye. It did take me years after leaving art school to know what I was creating, what I was looking at, how (if) it did or did not work.

Then he asked me why I left art school, didn�t finish (if such a thing does actually happen, finishing studying, that is!). I have two answers to that, the superficial answer and the more in depth answer. The first is that I spent the summer in Manhattan and hung out with practicing artists and liked it, wanted that life, one of painting and not being in school. It was a wonderful summer. The man (painter) living in the loft below the one I was subletting told me the best way to meet people in Manhattan was to give a party. So he called up his friends and we had a party. In those days �everyone� hung out at the Cedar Bar on University Place. And a phone call to the Cedar Bar brought the rest of �everyone� to �my� party. For the next couple of months it felt like I belonged there. Sometimes I would hear that Barnet Newman or Mark Rothko (or another famous painter) was at the Cedar Bar and I�d go down there, chat with friends, and stare at the revered artists. (Years later I met a woman who used to call up her artist idols, such as Louise Nevelson, and hang up when she answered. Just wanted to hear her voice.)

That summer I had part-time jobs with a temp agency but found it harder and harder to be locked up in cubicles all day. Eventually I got a job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art selling Christmas cards in September. Despite the magnificence of the Museum and the joy of eating in the staff cafeteria, only a few people buy Christmas cards that early and the job was very boring, By October my attitude was not what they wanted and I was fired. Meanwhile I found it much harder to paint on my own than I expected. Winter was coming and my friends were busy with other things so my romance with Manhattan was challenged. It took a while (many years) to sort things out, to learn how to be a self-motivated, disciplined artist.

The other reason that I quit art school is, maybe, that I had done extremely well in school and was afraid that I couldn�t live up to their expectations of me. So here I am, many years later, teaching and trying to tell students self-discipline is the most important thing I can teach them, that they know best what they want, and they are the best critic of their work, yet it takes discipline to develop that kind of knowledge to a place where it is a constant. And I am painting and putting the work out in the market place. I still wonder what it would have been like if I had continued with art school, finished the program. But I�ll never know for sure.

Posted by leya at August 10, 2005 07:01 AM