Why do I teach art?

(Somebody please remind me)

I’m trying to remind myself why I teach art. I’ll grant you, it is a weird question for somebody like me who has dedicated the past decade to finding a way to share my love of making art with my community to ask, but I’m currently worried that it might have been a terrible idea so I’m circling back.

photo: Unknown photographer

Why did I want to teach painting in the first place? Much less start a school to do it. Much less spend years writing a book about it.

Photo: Adolph de Meyer , Metropolitan Museum

It is a taxing thing to do, this rallying of people around a dying art form that provides more paths to failure than the other, more forgiving arts forms like ceramics do. There are these terrible, unyielding guard rails around the definition of what a perfect painting is. We cannot all paint The Birth of Venus, but the expectation is there.

Sandro Botticelli, The birth of Venus

Not to mention how much time it takes away from my own art making to do the teaching. The only serious paintings that got made by me in 2023 were in the periods when I was not teaching.

Photo: Dave Robbins

So I’m looking back to the genesis of this and struggling to remember: Why did I go from painter to painting teacher? And has it been worth it?

This amnesia is just one more sign that things in my life are out of balance. (I mean this literally and figuratively, I slipped on wet leaves a few weeks ago while walking my dog and messed up both my hand and my face. I broke 3 dishes while making grilled cheese and tomato soup last night. I fear for all of my electronics when placed within six feet of a liquid.) It might be hormones or Jupiter entering this sphere or that or a general weakness of attention and stamina that comes with malaise. Or, and this would be the hardest to overcome in order to regain my equilibrium, a general weakness of character, an issue of not finishing what you started in the proper way.

Why did I start?

There was that dining room of my friends house that was covered in the small, beautiful stretched canvases of monochromatic and split-complimentary color themes. I remember them being seascapes. The impressive artworks of a father who only picked up painting in assisted living. And me thinking, what a shame. What if he would have learned to paint earlier?

Around that same time there was that conversation with my friend Sarah who had won a ballroom dance class at her local grocery store. She had her husband had that first, free class, fell in love with ballroom dancing together, and started going on the regular. She went from somebody who had never thought about dancing to somebody who thought about it and doing it. She went from somebody flipping past a ballroom dance competition on a Saturday afternoon cable to somebody who stopped, watched with both knowledge and admiration, and who now maybe fostered her own secret fantasy of fighting for her own trophy some day. She went from unengaged with dance to engaged with it. That expansion of a life is what learning to make art does best and maybe I had my own fantasy (or a hero complex) that I would become a life expansion savior running around handing out paintbrushes and life expansions here and there throughout Brooklyn, like some sort of art Easter Bunny.

But why am I now considering giving up all this teaching? I think it might be a terrible and simple truth that I am tired and this is a hard thing.

This is a tough thing to admit for a girl like me raised by a cowboy dad and a farm girl mom who, if they were ranking character flaws in order of terribleness would rank laziness and being a quitter as tied at number one. (I think it is worth noting, given the fact that doing this teaching involves a giving of yourself in a way, number two of worst character traits in the eyes of my mom and dad would be a lack of generosity.)

Then there is my husband, who also despises laziness and stinginess, but who also has a thing about sweatpants. He would never wear a pair. He gets up and puts on the jeans he will wear the rest of the day - his disgust around things of comfort (Lay-Z-Boys, leisurewear, Baby Bjorns) has him jumping immediately into day wear with no intermediary clothing option to help him ease into the day. And here I am, plotting how to be more comfortable in my life.

Maybe I want more sweatpants.

Ramon Casas, Laziness

Maybe I’m just tired of doing this art school on two feet in New York City. Running to art stores and crafts stores without a car. Ferrying easels and art supplies around town on rainy nights, forgetting palette paper or having a stretched canvas get destroyed along the way. Maybe it is just harder than I feel like having my life be.

Teaching art is incredibly difficult. Or maybe it is just difficult for me. I live with the assumption that everything comes easier to everybody else because I am fueled by self-loathing. But for me, it is a struggle to define each lesson, to help each individual get something out of that lesson, and then to convince them that their creation has beauty in it. And there is a bit of beauty in every work of art by the mere fact that a human has tried to connect their crazy inner life with a crazy external one and that they used their hands to do it. And for somebody who is aware of my lack of brilliance, I will say the thing I am brilliant at as a teacher is spotting that beauty. I just wish I was better at explaining why something is beautiful to my students.

But yesterday I watched a PBS program, Design in Mind, about filmmaker James Ivory (A series that is very interesting in terms of connecting the creative process to a place, a newsletter topic for the future) and he talks about his first exposure to art being via painting lessons from a nun when he was a little boy. I thought of how those lessons became all of the Merchant Ivory films. And I thought of my great-great grandma Ewald who had learned how to make beautiful paintings through WPA painting classes in the middle of South Dakota. And I thought of my Grandma Woster, my spiritual other half, who was a child prodigy pianist who could play anything by ear from the age of 3.

This is a photo of my grandma’s “Music Room” in her small house in the river town of Chamberlain, South Dakota, on the edge of the Missouri River. With her organ and her piano and I think a drum kit and definitely an accordion and a bunch of guitars. My aunt (Mary Haug who has written some wonderful books) and I did a talk at the South Dakota Festival of Books last year called “Creative Inheritance” about the absolute gift it was to grow up in a family where music and books were the center of everything. And I pointed out in that talk how bizarre it is that in my grandma’s tiny little house an entire room was dedicated to making music.

But note the painting hidden on top of the piano. That is my grandma’s. Her canvases were scattered everywhere in the house. Stacked five deep at the foot of the stairs, stuck behind her couch, next to her THREE recliners. (Worth noting she had a lot of magnets on her refrigerator that said things like: Dull women keep immaculate homes) She had turned her entire mud room into a studio, too, after learning to paint from a neighborhood woman who ran classes out of her house in a setting not that dissimilar from what I do. And it was a huge part of her life, not just the art making, but the community that builds up around art making.

Marie Woster, Untitled

It oddly makes me feel better about this decision to teach art and all of the things I have to give up to do it to think of this teaching as some sort of payback for that creative inheritance. It is an obligation. I am required to teach painting because I was was given a family legacy of creativity and art making that a lot of people don’t have. And if I don’t pass along that creative inheritance the cycle of generosity will be broken.

Photo: A grainy photo of my cousins and sister and I engulfing my grandma during our annual summer stay at her house.

One of the last times I was one-on-one with my grandma, we were having lunch at Perkins and she was telling me about marrying my grandpa. “We had a wedding where we served bananas in the morning and then we went to our house that afternoon. He had built a little house with his brothers in the middle of a plot of land. It was only two rooms and when we got there he opened the door and in one of the rooms was a piano.”

“How did he afford a piano? Where did he get it?” I asked, well aware of how difficult that would have been for a poor farmer in the middle of South Dakota in the late1930s to do.

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask. He just knew I needed one.”

Sometimes you just need a piano. Sometimes you just need paint. Sometimes you just need art.

And I guess there are a lot of people out there who need art and just don’t know it yet. I remember it now. That is why I started teaching, because I was taught and it made my life better.

So I should pull up my big girl pants (or sweatpants as the case may be) and figure out what and where to teach next.

Thanks for making it through all this angst. I appreciate it.

xoxo Sara

My Book: Painting Can Save Your Life: How and Why We Paint

www.sarawoster.com

www.thepaintingschool.org