The other day one of my Drawing I students asked me, “When did you first know you wanted to be a teacher.” Usually ready with an answer when it comes to queries of how to add more contrast to a pen drawing or the difference between willow and compressed charcoal, this question gave me pause.
The truth of course is that a little over a year ago, I had never even in my wildest imagination seen myself standing before a class of college art students. (Which is, in part at least, what I candidly answered her).
But given the whimsical illustrations that fill my childhood sketchbooks and now the walls of my neighborhood art studio, is my imagination really not expansive enough to envision myself as a teacher, educator, or mentor?
No, it’s more likely a life-long willfulness to not follow any path but my own. My first sentence as a child was prophetically, ‘I do it my own self.’ With not only an older sister but a mother, grandmother, and great grandmother as former teachers it’s little wonder I shrugged off any suggestion that I might continue the career that’s defined my maternal lineage if I was determined to chart my own path.
“I’ve simply taken my own circuitous route to arrive in not at the same path, but a continuation of where they left off.”
And yet, even that is not entirely true. During a recent visit to the Des Moines Art Center with my parents who were visiting from out of town, I was reminded, viscerally, of another branch in my maternal family tree that surely has influenced my choice of career: the American realist painter, George Wesley Bellows. Surname and genealogical records aside, one glance at the portrait Aunt Fanny (Old Lady in Black), 1920, is indicative of our common blood. Aunt Fanny sits with hands folder in her lap, her narrow face framed by the same jug ears as my great uncle Clare Bellows, her soft blue eyes identical to those of my aforementioned grandmother (Charlotte Bellows, before she married).
Aunt Fanny (Old Lady in Black), George Wesley Bellows, 1920
All my life I’ve thought of myself as forging my own path, valuing independence above all else. In reality though perhaps instead of running away from the well-worn path of my predecessors I’ve simply taken my own circuitous route to arrive in not at the same path, but a continuation of where they left off. Teacher and artist, but still uniquely me.
There is truth to the statement that I never imagined myself as a teacher prior to being hired as an adjunct art instructor a year and a half ago. But ever since I’ve inhabited that role, I’ve come to realize how very true, how very authentic it feels to me.