Seems like all I write about now are customer encounters at the grocery store and deaths. I'm afraid this post falls in the latter category. I received word through my friend and fellow art student, Anna, that our grade school art teacher, Sonja Sellers passed away last week.
I remember quite vividly the several days Sonja Sellers visited to instruct my class on how to better use our crayons and watercolors. She mentioned that she taught art lessons after school at her home studio for interested students, which I was. It wasn't long before my parents were buying me a tackle box to store my oil paints, bushes and pastel chalks as well as canvases of various sizes that I would tote when I was dropped off at her doorstep once a week.
While painting seascapes, I learned how to mix and apply gradations of color in the sky and the foreground. I learned about “halos,” her term for the little unpainted specks on a canvas that were never to be overlooked. Pulling out my old canvases was a step back into my past to look at my handiwork, which also had Sonja Sellers' handiwork all over it. Her corrective brushstrokes were still very evident to me.
In one stormy seascape, which hung above my grandmother's television set for years, there is a frothy, foamy wave crashing near the shore. I will never forget watching Sonja Sellers' load up the bristles of a toothbrush with white paint and using her thumbnail to flick the paint onto the canvas to create the effect of sea spray. Magic.
I had two unwavering collectors of my work: my grandmother, who bought that stormy seascape -the only piece ever exhibited (at the local bank), and my mother who proudly hangs several of my originals on the walls of my parents' home. I enjoyed painting animals, the images of which came from my father's National Wildlife magazines. But what I really enjoyed painting were, as if you couldn't guess, Muppets. I literally rendered a still from “The Great Muppet Caper” in oils. My mother preferred the seascapes.
While excavating original works I'd made under Sonja Sellers' (I always have to use both names for some reason) tutelage from under my parents' guest room bed, I discovered that my memory had been playing tricks on me for quite some time. This is when I also realized the importance of dating everything alongside a signature. I thought I remembered her class visit happening in my 6th grade year. But when we started pulling out the old canvases and drawings, it seems she came during my 5th grade year, making that particular grade a seminal one for determining my life's course.
In Betty Harris' 5th grade class, following the positive response from my improvised presentation on the Gold Rush of 1849 with puppets, I knew I wanted to be a puppeteer. Also that year, an an effort to avoid Physical Education, I joined the school band, which would later have even more humiliating repercussions than the ones I imagined for P.E.. The upshot came years later when I traded that trombone, minus the mouthpiece which had been removed by an assistant band director who insisted I couldn't march and play at the same time, for my first guitar. That year I also started taking lessons from Sonja Sellers, which is where I first met Anna, who became one of my closest friends through our high school years and into our first years at Troy University. It's a friendship that's, thankfully, endured.
Eventually, after maybe two school years' worth of lessons, I had to give them up because symphonic band practice happened on the same day as my art lessons, leaving little gap time to get from one to another. My parents had purchased the trombone I “played” in band, which was the bigger investment, so my sessions with Sonja Sellers came to an end.
I hated giving up those art lessons. They were such a welcome respite from the social anxiety I experienced in school. She created a space were her pupils could create and learn in a non-judgmental environment. That said, I was not a gifted painter (I was a worse trombonist). But now I realize that learning how to do something is sometimes just about the learning process and picking up lessons which become evident at a later time. I realize that the subject matter of what I painted wasn't nearly as important as learning the skill and techniques of painting. I'm more informed as a creator now because of the things Sonja Sellers was teaching me (or trying to) in those lessons and for that, I am so very thankful to her.
I had two unwavering collectors of my work: my grandmother, who bought that stormy seascape -the only piece ever exhibited (at the local bank), and my mother who proudly hangs several of my originals on the walls of my parents' home. I enjoyed painting animals, the images of which came from my father's National Wildlife magazines. But what I really enjoyed painting were, as if you couldn't guess, Muppets. I literally rendered a still from “The Great Muppet Caper” in oils. My mother preferred the seascapes.
While excavating original works I'd made under Sonja Sellers' (I always have to use both names for some reason) tutelage from under my parents' guest room bed, I discovered that my memory had been playing tricks on me for quite some time. This is when I also realized the importance of dating everything alongside a signature. I thought I remembered her class visit happening in my 6th grade year. But when we started pulling out the old canvases and drawings, it seems she came during my 5th grade year, making that particular grade a seminal one for determining my life's course.
In Betty Harris' 5th grade class, following the positive response from my improvised presentation on the Gold Rush of 1849 with puppets, I knew I wanted to be a puppeteer. Also that year, an an effort to avoid Physical Education, I joined the school band, which would later have even more humiliating repercussions than the ones I imagined for P.E.. The upshot came years later when I traded that trombone, minus the mouthpiece which had been removed by an assistant band director who insisted I couldn't march and play at the same time, for my first guitar. That year I also started taking lessons from Sonja Sellers, which is where I first met Anna, who became one of my closest friends through our high school years and into our first years at Troy University. It's a friendship that's, thankfully, endured.
Eventually, after maybe two school years' worth of lessons, I had to give them up because symphonic band practice happened on the same day as my art lessons, leaving little gap time to get from one to another. My parents had purchased the trombone I “played” in band, which was the bigger investment, so my sessions with Sonja Sellers came to an end.
I hated giving up those art lessons. They were such a welcome respite from the social anxiety I experienced in school. She created a space were her pupils could create and learn in a non-judgmental environment. That said, I was not a gifted painter (I was a worse trombonist). But now I realize that learning how to do something is sometimes just about the learning process and picking up lessons which become evident at a later time. I realize that the subject matter of what I painted wasn't nearly as important as learning the skill and techniques of painting. I'm more informed as a creator now because of the things Sonja Sellers was teaching me (or trying to) in those lessons and for that, I am so very thankful to her.
