H: 10/28/02

Work Diary, 10/28/02

While in college, I made it a point to take a couple of art classes
each year. I needed elective credits anyway, but I also liked the
atmosphere of the classrooms: the chalky moistness, the smell of
turpentine. I wore the same boy-next-door haircut and wrinkled clothing
throughout my four years at university; no one would look at me and
call me the artsy type. That, too, was the appeal of taking art
classes: My fellow students with their black hair and multiple
piercings could safely ignore me because I was no threat.

But I'd been studying art since I was a child, riding the bus to
Houston's Glassel School of Art, going to Europe in junior high with my
art teacher, sketching and painting as a hobby. My background could
have gotten me into the upper level art classes in college, but I
preferred the "intro" courses: Intro. to Basic Drawing; Intro. to
Ceramics; Intro. to Textiles. Those classes were much more relaxed,
more beneficial for someone who just wanted to do his own thing. And, I
will admit, there was a certain satisfaction in surprising those
be-pierced, black-haired kids who thought I was just another frat boy
filling time until graduation.

That's how I ended up in Sculpting 101 and Sculpting 102, an art class
for each semester of my junior year in college. For my first project in
Sculpting 101, I took several planks of wood and made the "Nuclear
Family." The family included a father, a mother, a brother and sister,
and a dog. They were simplistic, almost childlike, standing on their
own and smiling. The father and mother stood on the outside, with the
children just behind them, and finally the dog, towards the back with
its tongue hanging out. A happy picture, until you walked around to the
other side. From that angle, the family figures were bedraggled,
diseased, altogether un-pretty. They were set up like bowling pins,
just waiting to be knocked down. The piece was a play on the words
"nuclear family," my reaction to growing up in the 1980s amid the Cold
War and the threat of nuclear annihilation.

My second project was done almost entirely in plaster, and featured two
faces molded from the same mannequin head. The faces were mounted on
plywood; one looked outward while the other was a side view. Underneath
was an outstretched hand, palm upward and spray-painted white like the
board and the faces. The hand held a dozen tiny, bright pink
crucifixes, which I'd molded from a glow-in-the-dark crucifix my friend
kept over her bed. I wanted to show the commercialism of religion -
church as big business - and, again, make a play on words. In this
case, the term "two-faced" was my theme.

My third sculpture was titled, "The Fairy King." It was a
self-portrait, I guess, though as those things often go, it looked
nothing like me. It was a ceramic bust of a man with sharp features and
pointy ears, painted to look like stone. The back of his skull was
peeled back and up, forming a sort of crown and allowing me access to
the inside of the head, which I hollowed out. Inside the head, I glued
rhinestones, fake pearls, even an acrylic cameo of the Mona Lisa. My
intent was to show that appearances can be deceiving, or, at least,
that the mind is a strange and varied place.

For my final project, an installation piece, I suspended a miniature
bathroom from the ceiling of the installation room. I borrowed my
sister's dollhouse furniture, filling the little porcelain tub with
pinkish water. A flashlight illuminated the scene in the otherwise
pitch-black room, and I played a tape of someone pounding on a door
while water runs in the background. I wasn't suicidal at the time, but
suicide and murder were favorite themes of my classmates (the
installation room walls, for instance, had been splattered with red
paint by the student before me, whose project was a murder scene).
Instead of the goriness of such a moment, I wanted to show the
aftermath, to impart a sense of place. It seemed to me that a bathroom
recently emptied of a suicide victim would still echo those first
moments of tension and horror.

I received an "A+" for Sculpting 101, as well as the disdain of the
other students. My religion piece went missing, and I found my nuclear
family covered in boot prints.

After Christmas break, I returned to school and Sculpting 102, where I
produced an unfinished set of ceramic mugs - each with a man's
grimacing face on the front - and managed to clog up the clay-making
machine twice. That was it, for the entire semester.

I'm not quite sure how to explain the difference in my productivity, so
like any good student I'll blame my teachers. My Sculpting 101 teacher,
Kathy, looked like a cross between Laurie Anderson and Bonnie Raitt.
She believed in using found objects in sculpture, and held slide shows
of her own past work, the work of other graduate students, and that of
famous artists. Kathy buzzed around the studio during class, helping us
with technical problems and asking us questions so we could pinpoint
our motivation and theme. Her critiques were useful and comparative,
though she believed art was personal and generally not for mass
consumption.

Beth, my teacher for Sculpting 102, usually sat perched on a stool, her
surly poodle at her feet. Both watched us suspiciously from underneath
identical mops of unruly hair. Beth was also a graduate student; her
final project was a huge room with turd-like ceramic strings hanging
from the ceiling. Walking through it gave one the impression of
trudging through a dog park with zero gravity. On the first day of
class, Beth announced, "If you're here to make a set of dishes, this
isn't the class for you." Which may be why I immediately started on a
set of mugs.

For six years, I was a teacher - a rather bad one, in fact. Unlike
Kathy, and much like Beth, I just didn't have it in me to motivate my
students. My theory was simple: If the sullen-faced little brats didn't
want to learn, why should I waste my time? For students who showed
interest, I became very involved, but those kids were few and far
between.

Obviously, I'm not exactly the type of person parents want teaching
their children. I wish I'd known that before I spent six years of my
life looking out at a sea of faces, wondering which ones were worth my
time and which ones were just out to get me.

I wish, too, that I'd learned more about being a teacher from Kathy and
Beth - two people who influence me to this day, for better or for
worse.