chaperone

Lesson Ten: Counterfeiting

My Junior year, I had to do a term paper, but I wasn't experienced at either research or academic writing.

The previous year, my family had visited Washington, D.C., and the FBI building we learned about the Treasury Department's anti-couterfeiting efforts. I managed to add a little new research to the material I got from our trip, to write my paper.

We didn't have a typewriter at home, so I hand-lettered the paper in a New York Times seriffed style. Thinking back on it, that was a pretty conceptual tack.

 

Counterfeit term paper

Lesson Eleven: Drawing Lines

My friend Tom Steffens' mother said we could make a shuffleboard court in her basement. So we bought some red paint, brushes and masking tape to make the diagram on the painted, grey, cement floor. It took us two days to measure out the 3/4" wide lines and forever to position strips of masking tape on either side of the lines. We carefully painted the gap between the tape and waited an eternity for it to dry. We pulled the tape off anticipating a perfect pattern, but were disappointed because the paint seeped under the tape, and left an irregular edge. We thought we had done everything correctly, and blamed the tape for creating the "scooblies'. Whatever the cause, our enjoyment of the game was lessened.

Years later, long after I'd lost touch with Tom, Hans Breder (my Multimedia professor at the University of Iowa) taught me the trick to painting a sharp line using masking tape. We had laid the tape out right, he said. But in order to keep the paint from bleeding under the edge of the tape, we should have to sealed the line. That is, we should have painted over the edge of the tape with the base color (the battleship grey of the floor), let it dry, and then repainted the line with the top color. That way any paint that seeped under the tape would have been the color of the floor. Sure enough, lines painted that way were razor sharp.

Lesson Twelve: Action Painting

I had to give a speech for Mr. Stillwell's Public Speaking class my senior year. I chose to give one about poor, misunderstood Jackson Pollock, and how mixing up colors and splattering paint around was really quite fun and not totally phoney.

I'm sure the only source for information on Pollock I had would have come from either Life magazine or the Saturday Evening Post. To illustrate my speech, I made a small painting on cardboard, brushing red and yellow together for a background and flicking black paint on top of it.

 

10th grade notebook

My interests in theater were rekindled by a chance to be in my high school's production of Oklahoma! I played a cowboy and had to learn a bow-legged dance. While I was pretty good at music and sang in glee club and acapella choir, I wasn't much of a dancer and it took lots of practice to get me up to speed.

Oklahoma! 58

 

A couple of years later, the school did The King and I, and I had a speaking part in that one. I played the British ambassador who asks Anna to dance. It was just a box step waltz, but I could barely manage it. I wasn't much of a rival for the King of Siam who was a football star, but I did OK with the British accent as I was a natural mimic.

The King and I

The community theater did South Pacific about the same time (are you sensing a Rogers and Hammerstein pattern here?) and I played one of the sailors. I have to laugh now imagining the skinny kid I was at the time, singing 'There is nothing like a Dame!'

My father had joined the Navy during WWII, when he wasn't much older or thicker than I was in high school. He went to the real South Pacific. He never discussed his wartime experiences with me, but he left with light brown hair, and came home two years later completely grey.

The grey hair made him appear years older than his actual age, and in an odd way it kept him that age for the rest of his life. Dad played church league baseball well into his forties, and he got more than a few singles off the opposing pitchers who let down their guard because the thought they were throwing to an old geezer. His teammates called him the Silver Fox.

Community theater was an excuse for staying out late. It was my only vice in high school, although there were salacious types in the cast who tried unsuccessfully to entice me into small town versions of debauchery.

The Holland High School senior play, was Romanoff and Juliet, a comedy by Peter Ustinov. I played one of a pair of soldiers who comment on the follies of the rest of the kingdom's inhabitants. I excelled at the role, because (1) I didn't have a plot driven character, and (2) I didn't have to pretend to be interested in girls. I liked the chance to explore acting without behaving unnaturally.

Romanoff and Juliet

 

 

 

Lesson Twelve: Action Painting

I had to give a speech for Mr. Stillwell's Public Speaking class my senior year. I chose to give one about poor, misunderstood Jackson Pollock, and how mixing up colors and splattering paint around was really quite fun and not totally phoney.

I'm sure the only source for information on Pollock I had would have come from either Life magazine or the Saturday Evening Post. To illustrate my speech, I made a small painting on cardboard, brushing red and yellow together for a background and flicking black paint on top of it.

 

10th grade notebook

My interests in theater were rekindled by a chance to be in my high school's production of Oklahoma! I played a cowboy and had to learn a bow-legged dance. While I was pretty good at music and sang in glee club and acapella choir, I wasn't much of a dancer and it took lots of practice to get me up to speed.

Oklahoma! 58

 

A couple of years later, the school did The King and I, and I had a speaking part in that one. I played the British ambassador who asks Anna to dance. It was just a box step waltz, but I could barely manage it. I wasn't much of a rival for the King of Siam who was a football star, but I did OK with the British accent as I was a natural mimic.

The King and I

The community theater did South Pacific about the same time (are you sensing a Rogers and Hammerstein pattern here?) and I played one of the sailors. I have to laugh now imagining the skinny kid I was at the time, singing 'There is nothing like a Dame!'

My father had joined the Navy during WWII, when he wasn't much older or thicker than I was in high school. He went to the real South Pacific. He never discussed his wartime experiences with me, but he left with light brown hair, and came home two years later completely grey.

The grey hair made him appear years older than his actual age, and in an odd way it kept him that age for the rest of his life. Dad played church league baseball well into his forties, and he got more than a few singles off the opposing pitchers who let down their guard because the thought they were throwing to an old geezer. His teammates called him the Silver Fox.

Community theater was an excuse for staying out late. It was my only vice in high school, although there were salacious types in the cast who tried unsuccessfully to entice me into small town versions of debauchery.

The Holland High School senior play, was Romanoff and Juliet, a comedy by Peter Ustinov. I played one of a pair of soldiers who comment on the follies of the rest of the kingdom's inhabitants. I excelled at the role, because (1) I didn't have a plot driven character, and (2) I didn't have to pretend to be interested in girls. I liked the chance to explore acting without behaving unnaturally.

Romanoff and Juliet

 

 

 

Lesson Thirteen: Seeing Paint

Our family took one of our summer trips to New England and visited Fanuil Hall in Boston. There was an exhibition of paintings, and I'm pretty sure I'd never seen important (and by that I mean  'old') paintings before. I was stopped in my tracks by a work by John Singleton Copely. It was a picture of Paul Revere holding a silver teapot. But what I couldn't stop looking at, was the highlight on the pot. It was just a blob of white paint! The picture was so realistic and subtle, but that hightlight was just pure pigment.

Looking at that patch of paint taught me something about how to look at a painting, and something about how to paint one.

As soon as I got home, I asked for a set of oil paints, and on my birthday, I set up a little, bohemian, still life in my bedroom using a ginger ale bottle, a candle and a wine glass.

 

Wineglass and bottle

The wine glass must have been a gift, because my parents were tea-totalers. As their dutiful son, I even won an essay contest on the subject "Why I Believe in Total Abstinence." The prize was a free week at Total Abstinence Camp where a good time was watching a movie about a lung cancer operation.

It was the first time I ever met kids who actually smoked and drank.

Lesson Fourteen: Miss Wood

I was clueless about what to do after high school. Although I had taken courses (including two years of Latin) to prepare for college, I waited until I'd graduated to even think about applying. Fortunately, Holland was a college town and Hope college was a Reformed Church college so all I had to do was ask the local Plymouth dealer who happened to go to our church, to write me a recommendation, and I was in.

I took an art class the first semester. My teacher, Miss Wood (I never called her Marcia) saved my sorry ass.

Marcia Wood

Miss Wood had studied at the Courtauld Institute in London, and at some Ivy League school with Gregory Kepyes and Buckminster Fuller. She was firm without being strict, and had a great sense of humor, and I took every assignment she handed out as if it were mine alone. Today I would have known she was a lesbian, but at the time I didn't know what a lesbian was. That first year she taught basic drawing and basic design. I learned to look; something about composition; and improved my drawing skills.

 

Basic Drawing Still Life

As it happened there were three student art majors that year at Hope, and they were all seniors. You couldn't declare your major until your sophomore year, and there was no one in the pipeline. So when I declared my art major (as soon as I became eligible) I was the only art major, and I had the faculty's undivided attention.

My sophomore year, Miss Wood taught sculpture and three dimensional design. She was a terrific painter, but sculpture was her passion. She called me 'Melvino', and I was enthralled. During the short course of a semester, my work progressed from cute to solid.

 

 

Penguin

We mostly modeled in clay, did a bisc fire and applied patina with simple glazes or shoe polish. A photograph of one of my earliest abstract sculptures was published in Opus, the college literary journal. Miss Wood helped me name it 'Cathedra' (a bishop's chair.)

 

Cathedra

 

We talked a lot about the Renaissance, although there was no formal art history class at the time.

 

Gypsy Revelers

'Gypsy Revelers' my most complicated piece, was influenced by Miss Wood's admiration for Henry Moore.

Lesson Fifteen: Drawing Community

The bulk of the art department classes were held in the basement of a girl's dormitory, but the advanced classes and painting studios were under the peaked roof of the Chemistry Building next door. The drama department was also up there, and I spent many hours napping on the couches in the Little Theater's green room between classes. It was easy to be a part of things if you were willing to work backstage, and I made a whole new set of friends.

They played albums by Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary on the scene shop phonograph. It was my first exposure to folk music, and I was an easy convert.

The director of the Little Theater was sort of like Rory Schneider in All That Jazz; charismatic, self-centered, and manipulative. 

 

David Karsten

David Karsten demanded absolute loyalty from his company and  there was a kind of macho homo-erotic subtext about the place that I was too naive to catch on to. I wasn't on his radar as an actor

although I had one small part in a variety show. 

 

After seeing an article in Life magazine about John Cage making musical instruments from everyday objects, the assistant director had us make a parody of avant-garde music, playing roller skates and potted plants in formal attire and deadpan expressions.

 

CAge Parody

I wasn't bad looking, but I was a little self-conscious about my appearance. I had broken my nose somewhere along the line and one of my nostrils was almost completely closed. As I was a hay fever sufferer, my regular doctor recommended getting my septum repositioned. He referred me to a plastic surgeon. Celebrities were rumored to have flown to Grand Rapids for a Dr. Steffensmeyer face lift. For a hundred dollars more, he offered to give me the appearance of a movie star, and sure enough after only two, black-eyed weeks, I had a nose exactly like Leslie Caron's. People who knew me didn't seem to see the change, but I could never quite play character roles after that without exaggerated make-up.

Most of the art students were sorority girls or guys looking for easy credits. None of them took the classes very seriously, so it was hard to make friends there.

Halfway through my sophmore year, Rein VanderHill joined the program. I knew him slightly from high school. He was a year younger than I was chrologically. In artistic terms however, he was way ahead of me. 

 

Student back

Rein was a natural talent, who had been the star pupil of the teacher that replaced Mrs. Krum. He had gone to one of the Michigan universities after graduation, but didn't take to the environment, and returned to Holland.

He was much more advanced technically than I was, but my 'firstborn' position in the art department evened the playing field. Although we challenged one another we were never rivals.

Rein's girlfriend, Margo was an art student as well. (They eventually married and became art teachers in Iowa.)

Other students were soon added to the mix, and before you knew it there was a sense of community there as well.

Hope Art Major

Another instructor was added to the faculty.

 

Stan Harrington

Stan Harrington was handsome, refined and relatively young, having just graduated for the University of Iowa. He taught life drawing and it seemed to me he gave the girls in the class special attention. The models had to wear bathing suits, and I'm pretty sure none of them were men.

 

Hope Figure Drawing

Stan taught me about contour drawing, and how to get interesting effects with an eraser.

 

Contour Line Drawing

I landed small parts in plays, that led to bigger roles in plays like The Madwoman of Chaillot, Brigadoon, and Caligula. I played a young lover in Thieves Carnival and one of the fathers in the Fantastiks.

The head of the music department invited me to dinner although I barely knew him. I was a little uncomfortable because he always had a rather effeminate group of male students share his home. He said 'You're a person with many talents, but you'll never get anywhere if you don't choose one area to concentrate on."

At the time, I thought it was a peculiar piece of unsolicited advice, but I sometimes wish I had paid more attention to what I came to believe was his genuine desire to see me succeed. 

Lesson Sixteen: Art USA Now

Midway into my junior year, I dropped out of school, took a job working for my father at the Great Western Foundry, and began saving my money for a trip to Europe.

I don't know what made me do it. My sort-of girlfriend was going there for the summer, but that wasn't it. A local student, John Dalman, had spent time in London and came back with long hair and sly suggestions of scandalous behaviour, but I wasn't particularly adventurous, so that wasn't it. I may just have needed a break. Things were going kind of fast and I didn't know where.

Work at the foundry was a real change. I got up before six every day and rode with my dad to work. It was pitch dark when we got there, and the foundry was always dark inside with rust-covered windows. I had to stay until my dad was ready to go home, which was usually after dark, so my memory of the experience is like one long night.

In 1964, you could either fly to Europe or take an ocean liner for the same price ($245.) I went over on the 'Ile de France'. I met sophisticates and bon vivants onboard, and joined my friend, Billie Chain, and her sorority sisters in Vienna.for a three-week jaunt across Europe.

Packing for Europe 64

In Zurich, we saw a show of American art called Art USA Now. I had seen pictures of contemporary art in magazines of course, but the real things blew me away.

 

Art USA Now

The escapade wound up in London, where the girls left me to my own devices.

Lesson Seventeen: On My Own

When I thought about going to Europe, I thought about going there to study. Miss Wood had encouraged me to sign up for a course at the Courtauld Institute, but when I actuallly got there the only course available to me was a seminar in Italian Renaissance Architecture. No way, Man! So I settled into a student guest house; explored the city by day and went to Indian restaurants with Saudi students at night.

I took photos, and can still remember the moments I took them.

To convince myself I was studying, I bought a felt tip pen (believe it or not, in those days you filled them with ink yourself.) And made some drawings in my room.

 

London felt tip pen drawing

 

London boarding house drawing

I got tired of going out with the Saudis, but I was too polite to beg off, so I told them I was going to Paris and found a B&B near the city center.

On my own, I wasn't nearly as stable as I had been at the student house, and one day with the help of a Players cigarette, I learned more about myself than I was ready to handle in the basement men's room of the Tate Gallery.

London self-portrait

And, I ran home (or to be perfectly correct, I sailed home on HMS Queen Elizabeth II.)

Lesson Eighteen: Del Michel

I stopped in Philadelphia on the way, and visited Miss Wood in her new teaching position. It was tempting to think aout hanging out on the East coast, but the draft was on and I had to get back in school as soon as possible.

I took a part-time job in Steketee's men's department. I had some "Mod" clothes from my trip, and used my employee's discount to assemble a pretty stylish wardrobe. The elevator door opposite my cash register would open and teenage girls would swoon 'Paul!' when they got a quick look at my Beatle haircut. After work, I hung out at the college dorms listening to "I Want to Hold Your Hand' until we wore the record out.

A new instructor had joined the Hope Art faculty to replace Miss Wood. Del Michel, like Stan Harrington was a graduate of the University of Iowa's graduate program and a student of Byron Burford. Del's work was a mixture of drawing and painting.

Del Michel

Acrylic paint was the new thing, and Del liked to experiment with acrylic gel and washes over pencil and charcoal. He got me hooked on the process of painting.

Hope Landscape Drawing

I made a self-portrait, painting over a drawing on paper, I made of myself standing next to an empty barrel. I drew what I could see looking down at my lab coat, legs and feet, but I had to make up the head part.

 

Self portrait (overhead view)

 

Del was a big proponent of entering juried shows, and I got this one into a show at the Kalamazoo Art Center.