Rachel's Teaching

​Rachel's Teachings 

By Fred Holt 

Rachel exploits me in her art teaching, but I don't mind.  This month, I did caricatures of folks attending the annual Cinco de Maya Festival at her school.  It raises money for the PTA. I also demonstrate cartooning a couple of days each year for her students.

Her first art experiences were likely my cartoons, but she has moved much beyond them.  For years, she drew trees with big knot holes in them just like mine. 

Mary Ellen and I collected most of John and Rachel's early work and pasted them on sheets of  butcher paper.  We have these yet. They are a capsule histories of their early maturation in art.

I am a little uncomfortable doing cartoons for her class. I don’t think of cartoons as art, at least not art like Rachel and her students do. Rachel uses my demonstrations to show minimal line-drawing. I suppose that all Art teachers begin their classes using such primitive examples.   

My serious art career came to an end as a college freshman, in the first meeting of Frank Govan's Basic Drawing class. I was then considering majoring in Art. 

I copied the comics in the Arkansas Gazette as a kid.  I won the Poppy Day poster contest one year. One summer, Miss Myrtle Langston taught me to paint magnolia blossoms.  I did satirical cartoons for the school paper and the high school year book, and I drew Art Deco figures to decorate the junior prom.   

Mr. Govan had our class draw an old red barn. I worked two hours on that barn, When I brought my study back to the classroom, Mr. Govan hung it up to display. I thought that meant that he liked it. 

After the class returned, he did critical analyses of our barn drawings.  He didn't care for most of them, including mine, because they were trite. They merely looked like barns. But Carol Beth Cade's barn was special.  It had "mood."  It was "dark and fore-boding" and conveyed "a depth of vision."  

I was immediately discouraged.  I did my best that day, and it was clearly not good enough.  Carol Beth Cade made the only "A" that semester, and I majored in History.

My problem is that I don't see deeply.  Mary Ellen and I at-tended a Stuart Davis exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York one spring.  I first saw nothing in those squiggles.  Later, I noticed a group of visitors, led around by a docent, on a tour of the exhibit.  I joined them.

Through her words, that docent enabled me to see Davis' work. She introduced me to the details of the configuration in his shapes and patterns as well as the movement in his paintings. Later, through the words of subsequent guides, I began to see art in all sorts of new ways.                                                                                                                                                  

Each time I visit the sculptor, Terissa Mabry, we fuss about whether or not we can verbalize art. Terissa says that her art is its own medium of communication. If she could talk art, she wouldn't have to do art.  All I know is that one spring day, a MOMA docent began to pry open art for me with her words.

I was especially reminded of my superficiality in art the day Mary Ellen and I took Aunt Hattie to the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth.  The three of us went to a Salvador Dali show. Hundreds of his small pencil drawings, studies for his finished surreal works, were displayed in a big room. When we got there, several people were there, standing around taking notes and looking studious.

Aunt Hattie walked in the room ahead of us, spraddle-legged and clutching her purse. As Mary Ellen and I entered, Aunt Hattie said in a loud voice, "Freddie, you can to this good."

Everybody in the room turned to look at me.  There was no hole in which to crawl.  Trying to save the occasion, I said, "But I can't get anybody to pay me for it, Aunt Hattie."

There were the patronizing smiles throughout the room as the studious ones returned to their note-taking.

Rachel, on the other hand, is paid for her art, both as a teach-er and as a sculptor.  Her sculpture and pots have been shown throughout North Texas. They have "mood." Frank Govan would approve.  She moved from fantasy to wildly decorative, and she continues to experiment. She knew she had made it as an artist when one of her pieces on exhibit was stolen.

She has the gift of feeling and the ability to see. She also has Marty Ray, her fine teacher through the years, and an unsung woman at college who took her on a fascinating tour of art history. There is also her mama. She too has the gift for seeing.  She assists Rachel on Tuesdays  at the Louise Kahn School. She is constantly amazed at the work that Rachel's students do.

Like Marty Ray, Rachel teaches grade school kids different ways to do art, and, like her teacher at college, she acquaints them with the likes of Mondrian, Picasso, and Hopper. The students emulate all styles, and she papers the school with their work.

A proprietor of a local art gallery recently told Rachel that one of her second-graders came in to ask if she stocked any Claude Monet.  Rachel was pleased.

When I attend her classes to demonstrate my puny caricatures, I arrive early so I can watch her teach. As she takes them through, say, the art motifs of     Medieval times, I am amazed at her gentle but firm approach with the students and the joy of expression they experience.  I shed proud tears as I watch her work.  The best I can do is to write about all this in words.  But words, it seems, are my thing.