NOCCA (pt2) - the instructors
Wednesday, June 01, 2005
When we (the first year students) started NOCCA, i think we were all a little disillusioned. The three primary instructors were Mr. Gross, head of the Visual Art Dept. and Art History teacher; Ms. Pichata (aka Mrs. Gross), drawing teacher; and Ms. Mouton, printmaking teacher. For the first few months we were there we thought they were great, fun people. Eventually we began to realize the our error.Mr. Gross really was. He was a kinda goofy, heavy-set guy with a strange sense of humor, but he was also somewhat quick tempered and didn't always seem prepared to be dealing with teenagers on a constant basis. He was the guy in control, the one who set the agenda, as well as made an attempt to teach us about American Art. I've found over the years that Art History classes are difficult to appreciate and pay attention in, but it's hard not to get something out of them. Perhaps it's just the visual nature of memory that helps us to retain the names of the artists as we watch the slides with our heads sinking in our hands.
I can't remember any reason in particular, but i can remember Mr. Gross getting very upset with us numerous times, most likely for not paying attention. He'd turn beat red and get irate with us for not caring about Winslow Homer as much as he did.
Ms. Pichata was really Mrs. Gross, but they never openly acknowledged the fact that they were married, which over time grew to be quite ludicrous. We all knew. The Grosses drove matching fiats with matching orange hardhats in the rear windshields. The Grosses showed us slides of their trip to the Lourve, as if we weren't going to put 2 + 2 together that they were in Paris together. Mrs. Gross tried so hard to be "funny" like Mr. Gross, but it always came off as forced. It was like she was utterly unable to like us and relate to us, but she really wanted to try. You can tell, when you speak to someone, if you are connecting with them or if they are just nodding and saying "yeah." She was always just smiling and nodding, never connecting.
Mrs. Gross was obviously the more trained artist of the two. She tended to be kinda fake and scatterbrained, but i'd be willing to say she was considerably more capable of abstract thought than her husband. She taught us quite a few different drawing techniques that, when i think back now, were truly helpful in my art education. She taught us contour drawing, where your lines follow the shape of the plane of the object you are drawing; gesture drawing and figure drawing; pointalism; blind-gesture drawing ("don't look at the paper!"); subtractive drawing, where we covered sheets of newsprint with charcoal and basically drew with erasers; and some other random things like self-portraits, collage, and even a bit of calligraphy. I'm kinda surprised, writing this now, how much i can remember the exercises we did with her. It's probably because i was always most interested in drawing over other forms of visual art. Though i wasn't too fond of Mrs. Gross, i don't think it's a stretch to say that i actually learned more from her than any other art teacher i've had-- which is a scary thought. (I've failed to mention, to this point, that Mrs. Gross looked like a petite version of the Joker with a bob haircut.)
I'm not really sure why, of all things, we had a printmaking teacher while we didn't once pick up a paint brush. That being said, we all liked Ms. Mouton best of the three. Maybe i should reword that. We all genuinely liked Ms. Mouton. She was a younger African American woman who seemed to really be able to relate to us on a personal level. I think she could also relate to some of our frustrations with the Grosses; she obviously lacked seniority and the Grosses weren't particularly inconspicuous about disregarding her ideas and suggestions. It eventually got to the point where we used her classes as open critiques of the Grosses.
I don't really remember the projects that we did with Ms. Mouton very well except for a few things we did with relief prints... etched woodblocks and whatnot. I never found the printmaking stuff all that interesting, but i do remember those projects being the most relaxing by far.
Previous NOCCA entry
Continue with part 3 ->
posted by j. Permanent Link
