(Pic #1) My own "sidewalk show" found on the street in Calabasas, California
How my high school art teacher changed the way I view – everything.
I remember the day I understood what it meant to succeed at a task – specifically a school art project. It wasn’t the grade — nor the obligatory oohs and ahs from my parents — it had to be something I felt inside. I didn’t know this until I was 15 – when my 10th grade art teacher, “Mr. Printz” tossed out a question that made me cry.
(Pic #2) Robert Printz, former Great Neck North High School Art Teacher
We were assigned a sculpture project, and I had chosen to make a plaster of paris oak tree in the middle of our living room in Great Neck, Long Island. I knew I needed something to hold the plaster onto the trunk, so I bought a roll of chicken wire and made what I thought was an adequate column, covered in traditional paper mache, and onto which I spackled the wet plaster.
Epic fail.
The plaster never dried, and by the time I had gotten the masterpiece to class, I had left a goopy white trail from my house through the halls of Great Neck North. The project had become an oozing blob of white goo supported by a sickly crumpled wire foundation… resembling a little more of a Dr. Seuss character than I might have hoped.
I knew I had to submit the work, and had to speak about it. I was paralyzed. But Mr. Printz cut right through my consternation, and asked one thing:
“Lon, does this piece raise your blood pressure?”
At first I thought, well, yes, but only because I am completely humiliated. I knew that wasn’t what he meant. He went on to explain that you know when a work is good when it sends you somewhere, speaks to you, makes you really feel something.
I felt nothing.
Lesson learned: Appreciating a turn of phrase, a high note, a sidewalk show
From that day on, I have always tried to judge my work by this standard, and it has become a part of my psyche – an internal mechanism of sorts — for appreciating and exploring art: in literature, in music, and on canvas.
It’s why I get so excited reading certain descriptions of nature in a Robert Frost poem, hearing the late jazz great Susannah McCorkle sing “Waters of March” or finding an unexpected artistic jolt on the sidewalk while I’m out for a jog. I’m now recognizing — and savoring — when I do feel my blood pressure rise. It’s what’s supposed to happen when you do your best work, and appreciate the beauty of art around you.
In describing blue butterflies, I love that Frost uses the phrase “flowers that fly.” (See poem above.) I still get misty when McCorkle slips into the Portuguese chorus, and just last week my blood steamed up when I saw this Mondrian-style cement block (Pic #1) on a sidewalk in Calabasas.
It’s a wonder I have time for anything else. Thank God for that, and for a sobering critique from Mr. Printz.
“Life is not measured by the breaths we take but by the moments that take our breath away.”
— Tina Adderholdt
My dear Lonnie,
I cannot begin to tell you how gratifying it is to know that I have had such a positive and profound an influence on another human being and to know that through your efforts others will be positively influenced in their lives as well.
What you have said becomes, for me, the most precious of gifts.
Hey, Lonnie!
I fully agreed with your statements and identified with them fully, since I, too, attended Great Neck North High School and was taught and inspired by Mr. Printz! (And also by art teacher, Mr. Shields, if you remember him.)
Anyway, I, too, paint and write, and I would love to share “creativity” with you. I live in the West Los Angeles area. I’d love to meet for coffee, if you have the time.
You can contact me at the above e-mail address.
Regards, from a fellow “North-er”.