I’m quite certain that I was the only student in my first art class who hadn’t had at least some exposure to art classes in high school. As I look back at my naivete, it reminds me of my childish ambition to be a ballerina, in which I assumed that all I had to do was sign up with a ballet company and they would train me to be a ballerina. In other words, anybody could do it, no previous experience was necessary.
My ignorance wasn’t very evident to my classmates during the lecture portion of the art appreciation class. The art history lectures were conducted in a dark theater where we viewed slides of art works projected on a screen while the lecturer told us just what we were seeing, where it originated, who had created it, where it is now, its size and medium, and other boring details. Others in the class seemed to be familiar with most of the things being projected in that stuffy basement room where I found it almost impossible to keep from falling asleep. I had seen absolutely none of those things before and found it hard to relate to their significance. I supposed that, if I should ever be so lucky as to travel to some of the locations mentioned, seeing the real thing would be much more interesting.
The studio portion of that class was much more to my liking. Everybody else came to class with drawing and painting supplies, as if they knew what would be required of them. Some even arrived with portfolios of their work. I hadn’t a clue, and when the teacher came to ask what medium I was accustomed to, I mumbled that I liked to draw, mainly with pencil, but that I had made a lot of posters, backdrops for school plays and had designed parade floats for homecoming. The closest thing to art classes I’d had, I explained, was a semester of mechanical drawing, as my high school had offered no art classes. I added that I had designed the miniature golf course my dad built and sculpted the features of a life-sized mechanical alligator he had built.
My teacher looked puzzled but interested and asked what sort of things I liked to draw. “Well,” I told him, “I draw people – mostly from photographs. And I took one of those ‘Draw Me’ tests and won some correspondence school art lessons. They said I had talent, but I didn’t finish the course. I worked three years at the Penney’s Store arranging the display windows and lettering signs.” My teacher seemed unimpressed by my jumbled creative history but, when I asked him, he patiently gave me a list of basic supplies I would need for the remainder of the semester-long studio class.
The first quiz I had to take convinced me that I hated art history, even though I really enjoyed seeing all the works of art from early cave paintings right up through the Italian Renaissance. The quiz consisted of identifying the artist who created the artwork projected on the screen and its present location. Nothing about its significance in the progress of art over the centuries or our own reactions or interpretations of its meaning. My pathetically inadequate quiz paper was returned without a grade attached; only a note suggesting that I spend time reviewing slides and memorizing some of the facts I had so miserably failed to answer on the quiz.
I concluded that the quiz had been intended as a warning to buckle down and start memorizing. So, I did. The teacher in the studio announced that he did not believe in grades, and based grades on our attendance and enthusiasm. “As long as you show up for class and are productive, you will get at least a C,” he said. “If you produce something good, you will get a B. Nobody gets an A the first semester.” I found out later that, everybody who showed up and produced during the second semester was rewarded with an A. Standard procedure; nobody in the art department, it seemed, believed they had the right or power to judge the artistic merit of others’ work. I quit worrying about grades (which I had never had to worry about in high school) and settled down to learn how to draw and paint. Since my dad thought that being an artist wasn’t “quite nice” for a woman, I had decided to be an art teacher. It would be my first teacher in a painting studio the next year who would show me how.