Reclaiming my Fire for Art

STUDYING ART WITH ANDRÉ ANDREOLI

“Italian Façade” 1979. Acrylic on Canvas 20” X 24”

Have you ever noticed that many times when you make the “right” and responsible head decisions, they often come at the expense of your heart? Even if the desire of your heart is as yet an unspoken elemental need, life has a way of making it impossible for you to keep denying those buried yearnings, and for me it was art.  Pursuing art was an irresponsible career path I’d been told time and again.  Choose something that you’d be good at and can enable you to support yourself.  Only much later, in light of my mother’s successful career as an artist, would I understand the irony of those messages.

          So I shoved my heart aside. I made it a whole year in college, making responsible choices, working hard in my liberal studies degree in order to be prepared to enter teaching one day.  Frankly, I didn’t have time to think about it as I was also working full time to put myself through school. Too much contemplation could easily derail me, I knew. I would not let that happen.  My goals were written out as well as my timeline to accomplish them.   

I held out nine months.  I made it until my first college summer.

        Unable to stand it any longer, I swallowed my fear and feelings of inferiority when it came to art, and I signed up for a painting class that first summer after my Freshman year of

college in 1979.  The teaching artist relit the fire within me.  His name was André Andreoli, the most famous 19^th Century Dutch Romantic Landscape painter in the world living at that time, and he was visiting Santa Barbara that summer. Born in Holland, but the son of a successful businessman from Milan, I might never know how he ended up teaching a class at Westmont that summer, but I look back on it now as God prodding me directly.

            To say André was eccentric, enigmatic, and a force of nature was putting it mildly! Ten people had signed up for this summer class.  By week two, eight dropped out because he was so demanding and exacting, and his hot-headed Italian personality was off-putting to the sheltered Christian college students. He WAS a little bit terrifying at first! I had expected him to cancel class with only two of us left, as he would be basically working for free; I was only auditing the class after all. The need to paint had felt like it had been clawing at my soul, so the missing out on the credit didn't matter to me. I remember him standing there before Cathy and me, a thin, bony man, who seemed to vibrate with energy, giving off a sense of fierce strength. His long straggly black hair draping haphazardly around his shoulders, he was like someone you’d see in a movie featuring artists of the Renaissance. 

“Well, now I am left with the two of you.” We waited, unsure as to what he’d say next. Would he cancel class?  Then he followed with, “The only two that care to be here.” He grunted.  “To the rest, good riddance! He flung his arm out to emphasize his words.  Now, we can finally get to work!” Our eyes widened in pent up laughter, but we both found ourselves nodding eagerly, albeit somewhat nervously.  I expelled a relieved breath, which earned me a sharp look down his long nose, followed by a slow quirk of his lips, as close to a smile as I’d seen from him until that moment.  Oh yeah, he was a little scary, but my burning need to paint far outweighed my tender feelings and sensitivity, and honestly, there was this driving, insatiable passion for God and art that seemed to consume him.  It was utterly contagious.  

            Cathy and I remained for the summer, the class becoming more a private mentoring studio for two young women passionate about art.  It was a tough class, emotionally as well as in learning curve for me. He ranted and raved at me, the lesser skilled of the two students, often throwing his hands in the air and his long black hair whipping around him in loud, dramatic Italian consternation.  Sometimes he threw his brush across the room in frustration.  He’d grab my hand and yelled, “No! NO! Like this!” as he guided the line and pressure of the brush to help me “feel” the paint and create accurate line. Painstakingly, I painted, then repainted again and again, often working long into the night after work, trying to apply the learning in painting an Italian façade.  My result was very mediocre at best, but I keep it around as a reminder of André and the lessons about painting, art, life and God that I learned from him that summer. Every so often, I have the notion to add to it, refine it, finish it, with the skills that 40 years since have taught me, but I haven’t wanted to disappoint him after all of the time and effort he put into me that summer.

            Later in the course, I asked him why he’d decided to teach the class with only two people, and me only auditing the class at $25 because I couldn’t afford the price of the units.  He said he didn’t care about money, but that he did care about fire.  “I saw the fire in your eyes.”  He said that it was all he needed to see in a student…a “fire inside to paint.”  He told me “I can't teach a student to have fire, they either have it or they didn’t.  Skill I can teach, fire I can’t.”

Looking back now over my own career as a teacher and art teacher, I totally can understand and resonate with those sentiments. I can still name those students I've had in 38 years who had that "fire inside to paint"...Carlie, Anna, Liam, Alexis, Eliana, Kayvon, Jordan, Harry, Olivia...

            Having the opportunity to work with André Andreoli a world-renown painter is a cherished gift I never took lightly.

Forty-five years later, after that long career of teaching I did go on to do, I have returned to my first love of paint and am painting with that fire and passion I so loved in André. While my style is different, the romantic influence of my earliest lessons with him are evidenced in my art. Thank you, André Andreoli.