Holiday Catching Up

This time of year is always busy for everybody, but it has gotten worse for me in recent years.  Holidays add a lot of tasks to our lives, but the good parts of Christmas make up for them.  Not so good are all the arbitrary deadlines that pop up at the beginning of the year.  As a professor a huge pile of stuff comes my way as one year ends and the next one begins.  Over the past week I have completed the calculating of grades for all my classes and submitted them to the schools, and revised and submitted syllabi for the 4 classes I am currently scheduled to teach starting in January.  This afternoon I spent a little time up at the Studio printing the second batch of this year's Christmas card.  I haven't written out most of the ones I had already completed, but I know I will need more than what I have left, and today was the day to print them.  (got no photos, but if you want to get a sense of what it looked like, see this photo from the last print session, but this time it was 8 cards printed)

Last month on the occasion of his birthday I exchanged a few e-mails with my old friend Dave Lasky (holiday card and fun-pak will be coming soon) and one thing he mentioned was deaths from the previous year.  One of those was Barbara Goodstein, who he had tried to look up only to find she was recently no longer of this world, writing "she had such an impact on my life as an artist."  The more I thought about it, the more I realized it might apply to my life as well, and with no immediate deadlines to deal with for the rest of the night, I have a few minutes to write about it.

My first encounter with Dave was in Coach Coleman's Two Dimensional Foundations class, and while I admired his skill with a paintbrush, I didn't really know him then as he sat on the other side of the room, which led me not to trust him (a story I told in my contribution to one of his comic books).  The following semester we were also both in Barbara's Three Dimensional Foundations class and I learned he was a pretty good guy and we became good friends, so I owe that to her I guess.  The art department at our school was kind of small, about half a dozen full time professors, a few adjuncts, and no grad students to teach class.  Barbara was a temporary hire, perhaps a sabbatical replacement, covering our 3D class.  She was based out of New York City, literally flying down every week to Virginia, then flying back home for the weekend.  Don't know what the class was like before or after her, but she had us working with materials and subjects that were of interest to her as an artist.  Because that was really the only "sculpture" class I ever took, it was one of my sources when I was assigned to be a 3D instructor myself several year ago, my most regular class these past 4 years.  My first experience with found object sculpture came from that class, and that worked into a few projects I do with my 3D class each semester.  Her great love was figure, weeks spent modeling (from live models) in clay, and the figure was my subject for my Final Project, which involved a large plaster carving.

Unfortunately, at the university where I started teaching 3D, I was forbidden to use both clay and plaster (they feared it would dirty up the wood shop where I taught the class), so I had to come up with a lot of different projects for the class I would eventually teach.  However, this past fall I started teaching the class at my community college and was now required to use both clay and plaster during the semester.  So of course I brought my early experiences to the fore and we did a project that had a lot in common with my original 3D class.

But as I said, she loved the figure, so not only did she have us making dozens of clay figure sculptures in class, she required us to do figure drawing for homework, and the easiest way to get that done was to attend the open figure drawing sessions that she was in charge of.  Each week for two hours we had a nude model or two posing and anyone could just show up and draw them.  Much more interesting than the regular drawing classes.  Generally new and temporary hires were talked into (or maybe tricked into) running it for a semester.  I never took a drawing class as an undergrad, but I sat in on those open sessions almost every week for years, even being put in charge of running it myself during my senior year,  (one of my housemates once referred to it as my "Wednesday night nudity party") likely being picked to do it because I knew more models than anyone else.  Learning to draw people was always one of my goals from a young age (comic book influence perhaps), and those open sessions did a lot to teach me figure drawing, which I taught for a few years at my community college. so I guess I owe her for that as well.  So it is fair to say she had a significant impact on my life as both an artist and art teacher, and my life might have turned out quite different if  she hadn't been around.