When I was a teenager, I never knew anything about art. I think in South Africa at that stage, no one was really exposed to it. There were no museums that had great artists in them.
I'd like to work on putting art programs back in schools.
I was at the Royal Art School. That was a preparatory school specially for art teachers. You see, it was not so much for the development of artists. But we had there terribly stiff training.
Art shouldn't be prohibited in public schools when kids in private schools always get it.
The elementary school I went to, Valencia Park, was focused on the arts.
If I ever go back to college, I'd study art education.
I studied art just short of the level where you can earn a degree.
The art establishment has turned away from the old curriculum which puts beauty and craft at the top of the agenda.
I feel sorry for kids nowadays, because in the majority of schools across the country, the arts have been eliminated from the curriculum. There's no art; there's no music. In some cases they've taken away the libraries. They don't do theater. And these are the things that speak to the human soul.
Things like anatomy and drawing and design and color had pretty much been drop-kicked out of the curriculum in the '70s, when I was studying art, in favor of abstraction and minimalism.
When I was in sixth grade, they slashed the budgets for all of our school art programs, so my grandparents enrolled me in art classes at Worcester Art Museum, which I attended from sixth to 12th grade.
I've decided to go for a B.A. in art. It's the shortest route to a degree. I'm thinking about teaching.
I taught a lot of art history, especially Chinese, Japanese, and Indian. But the painting classes came back. The nudes came back. Not so much the still lifes. So now our department is the worst department, partly because it has the worst facilities.
If some student came up and wanted to know where to study painting, you'd want to suggest someplace, but there's no place. I wouldn't know where to send a student to study.
