School and the lack of it. (Part 1 of 4)
Having skipped the first grade, my unspectacular scholastic career began in the second grade. Because of this, I was always the youngest of my contemporaries and I graduated high school at age seventeen in 1968. During my senior year in high school I maintained my first independently functioning painting studio in a building in Coral Gables, Florida, about a twenty-five-minute drive from my home. I had a part-time job after school, working for Grand Union Department Store that paid $1.25 per hour. The rent on my studio was $25.00 per month, and the electric bill rarely exceeded $2.00.
I realize this wasn’t an ordinary circumstance, given my age at the time, but I had been standing at an easel, trying to figure out how to paint, since I was nine years old. So, when the spare bedroom in my parent’s home, which I had been using as my studio, became too restrictive, I went looking for a space to rent. It just seemed like a natural progression to my parents and myself. My mother remarried when I was twelve. Until then I was raised by my single mother and had, either by necessity or natural selection, become very independent and mature for my years.
The great frustration of my burgeoning artistic life was having to reinvent the wheel where painting was concerned. I always wanted someone to show me how to paint; how to achieve the effects I wanted put on canvas. These skills were known, of course, so it became increasingly unbearable for me to have to figure it out for myself through the laborious route of trial and error. If someone would just demonstrate these techniques for me, just once, it would save all the time and materials I was wasting through the hit or miss approach I was using.
I had a brief episode with a painting class one summer during high school. It was a college level class offered through Miami Dade Junior College. Prior to this class, I had finished a painting of Bob Dylan and entered it in a high school competition. It kept winning awards and, lo, it won some award or other whereby the Governor of Florida, Claude Kirk, called me up on a stage and presented me with an award certificate, or a blue ribbon, or something like that.
I brought that award-winning painting to my painting class to have the instructor critique it and tell me how to improve upon it. The teacher took up a brush, dabbed it into some paint and began working on my award winner. By the time she was done with it, my painting was completely ruined. I tossed the former award winner into the nearest dumpster. My great error was in thinking that there was some quantifiable objective “right” way to paint. The instructor had her vision of what she thought a painting should look like, and I had mine, and, boy oh boy were they ever different.
Still, this experience taught me a significant lifetime lesson: Beware of experts! And, by “beware” I mean be very selective to whom you surrender yourself. To come out whole at the end of an education one must find the delicate balance between surrender and remaining true to oneself. It’s obvious. Look at all of the great artistic voices we admire in any of the arts; the ones who have found their own unique style are the ones we que up for. All the rest are busy copying the originators, and by copying, they lack the creative spark that the originators possess. That is what happens in art schools. There is a teacher, and there are 30-40 students all painting like their teacher.
In May of 1989, I was invited to participate in a group show in New York City at the prestigious Grand Central Galleries. The gallery director showed me three paintings hanging next to one another and asked me what I thought of this artist’s work. After I conveyed my thoughts, the director confessed that they were done by three different painters, all of whom studied with the same teacher at the Art Students League. I could not tell one apart from the other, and that was precisely the gallery director’s point.
After high school, I attended The Ringling School of Art in Sarasota, Florida in 1968. This was the real deal. Considered to be one of the highest ranked art schools in the nation, it was, in those days, restricted to a maximum of only four hundred students and one had to submit examples of one’s artwork to be judged for entrance. I was lucky beyond belief to be in with the crème dela crème. Forget that teacher at Miami Dade Junior College who ruined my Bob Dylan painting, these teachers were the gold standard in the nation. Here is where I would learn to paint… just not quite yet. Painting classes were taught in the second-year course. Our entire first year was spent exclusively in drawing. There was perspective to learn; figure drawing; portrait drawing; lettering and color & design. We would draw eight and a half hours every day under the expert gaze of our instructors. After school, I would return to my rented bungalow and stand at my easel and paint into the wee hours.
