To Teach Art

Those Who Can. Do!

Those Who Can’t. Teach!

I first heard the above quote sometime in college. Those cliché-filled-and-fueled college years, when all-knowing freshman students scorn their professors; a time we believed professors became teachers because they couldn’t make it in the real world.

Interestingly, all the men… hmmm… most of the men in my immediate family marry school teachers, and school teachers are different from the rest of us. A typical Thanksgiving dinner becomes an unending litany of instructions, beginning with our entry at the front door.

“Take off your coat, hang it on that third hook. No! Not that one, the third hook. Sit in that chair over there. Not that one, the closer red one… .”

So it would go until the buffet line started.

“Pick up the plate, take a napkin. No. Not that napkin. Help yourself to… .”

Boy-oh-boy, Kotyuk men sure like bossy women.

Is it true teachers can’t do and doers can’t teach? Is this a cliché with an element of truth or a myth waiting to be debunked?

Subsequently, I had the opportunity to teach, one hour a week, within various elementary schools. I taught drawing for Young Rembrandts, an after-school program. A discipline that adheres to the idea to teach drawing fundamentals by rote. That is, teaching future visual artists is similar to teaching the alphabet to future writers.

Ah… my classes. Within that hour, my students ranged from 5-year olds to 12-year olds. A disadvantageous age range because a 5-year-old child’s needs are different from a 12-year old child’s needs. Particularly as a 12-year old begins to believe they know everything there is to know.

It was easy to pick out those students who were there for their mother or father and not because they had an interest in drawing. Or, their interest had more to do with copying what the teacher had done, than learning the process of drawing.

What an education...

How do I enthuse students to draw what they see. I found myself caught up in “oiling the squeaky wheel.” That is, spending my time on the slower students, my pet peeve of other teachers [and employers]. That wide age range kept me on my toes, because children will always test and push you.

I taught drawing for 18 months and learned—I loved to teach. What joy to show a child the skills and tools to draw.

I immersed myself in various methods to present analytical thinking. How to translate three-dimensional images onto a small two-dimensional surface. What a breathless experience; to see a mind grow and expand with different routes to age-old drawing problems.

But, in the process, I found myself forced to choose between preparing for class or preparing a canvas; forced to interrupt my flow of ideas, where I am in that painting, and where I wanted to go. At that moment in my studio, flowing with ideas (and more often than not, struggling); regardless of what I was doing, I must leave to teach.

To return to the above cliché, I learned two valuable lessons during those 18 months.

First, children need precise direction. Put your coat on THAT hook. Take YOUR name tag and PLACE it in front of you at THAT desk. Sit in THAT chair. Use THAT paper. Etc., Etc.

Well—now I sound like my sisters-in-law.

Secondly, when I taught, there was very little mental energy left over. It is what I call “loss of psychic space” in my brain. In the free crevices of time during my day, rather than face a blank or half-finished canvas with “fiddle-fart” ideas, my time was spent on how best to reach a particular student to better understand how to draw.

Teaching was eating into my studio time. Eating into my psychic brain, my psychic space, and my psychic time. And so, I had to make an either/or choice. I couldn’t do both. Artists need a lifetime to grow within their area of expertise. Dancers and athletes spend years preparing for a two-hour performance or game. In the Olympics, your performance lasts only three or more minutes. That “eye-on-the-prize” focus cannot be split. For those few moments of “getting it right” we need years to get it wrong.

But, thanks to those little hellions, er… children, those 18 months changed me into a different artist—one whose perceptions were influenced by the world-view of 5-to-12-year olds; and, hopefully, I am a more understanding sister-in-law, as well.

If you get fewer than 2,000 rejections a year, you are not working hard enough.

©Ida Kotyuk, Portrait Painter

www.portraits-oils.com