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CLOSE CONTACT ART INSTRUCTION

October 23, 2015/ Dave Messing / Funny Stories / 2 comments

For better or for worse art instruction is often a close contact event. Usually for me the adult art students are sitting at art tables and I am standing behind them. When I need to take pencil or brush in hand I lean forward over their shoulder or sit close to them so that their artwork is directly in front of them and I make corrections or critiques from the side.

For a while I taught anatomy to a bunch of biker/tattoo artists. Truly a nicer group of guys there could not be but I was often reaching into a cloud of, “last nights beer and volcano wings topped off with a morning coffee and cigarettes for breakfast”.
Now on the total other end of the gamut is the beautiful lady type art student who seems to maintain her perfect figure by eating only salads with triple garlic dressing . She turns her pretty face up at me and asks, “hhhoooww am I doing on this so farrrr ?” Then there was one lady student who once told me , ” my ritual, on art day, is to stop and have a coney on the way to art class… As if I didn’t know.

Top on my list of olfactory student challenges was a cute little freckled country girl who walked into class one day. Complete with riding boots, blue jeans, pony tail and cowboy hat she introduced herself and we walked back to the classroom. Everything was going great with her art lesson and, of course, she was drawing a horse. During the course of the art lesson she shared with me the fact that she was a jockey at the race course. I quickly chimed in that I too loved horses and even loved the smell of horses.
It was at that moment that I was instantly healed of an apparent case of “nose blindness”. Backing away I realized that I liked the smell of horses ON HORSES … not on people. Not even on cute little cowgirl type jockeys!
By the time the art lesson was over I accidentally-on-purpose was on the other side of the class room and gave her a warm smile and a wafting wave goodbye. Cleaning up after class I found the main source of horse potpourri in the form of horsie-poo that had flaked from off her boots.
Someday I will have to tell you about the very faithful art student that for years came to her art class right from work … at the fish market !

Im not saying that in 30 years of teaching art it wasn’t, at some time, the other way around but I was always very careful to not even have coffee breath .