Buck Paulson

Teeter-totter

This is my "Playmate" for the past 49 years, 9 months and 14 days.


This week I want to say something else about teachers. Let me begin by relating an experience that I had a great number of years ago.

As Recreation Supervisor of Special activities I was very anxious to try and include art and related activities into my area of responsibilities. One idea was to have a Santa Barbara County portrait artist show sponsored by the Recreation Department. I sought for approval to have the show at the popular Faulkner Gallery of the Santa Barbara Public Library. It was approved and I went forward, seeking to notify all County artists of the opportunity. In publicizing the event, I took the occasion to visit several Adult Education Classes and made announcements there.

At one class, after I made the announcement, the woman teacher said, “You have a great head. You would make a great model.” I said, “No thanks, I am studying art myself.”
“Oh, with whom do you study?”
“Claude Buck,” was my proud reply. I HEARD SNICKERS IN THE ROOM! I was so upset, I wanted to slug someone! I knew that Claude Buck’s name had not been revered in that class.

Let me make a point. When our children were small I would take them to a playground where they enjoyed many different apparatuses. One we particularly enjoyed was the teeter-totter.
What made the teeter totter special was that I could teeter with one child or several of the children at the same time. All I had to do was to move forward or backward on my side of the teeter and it balanced the other side.

But one truth remained in effect. One side had to go down in order for the other side to rise, and so forth.

Consider how this teeter-totter principle should not apply to art teachers. Students need never pull another teacher down, in order for his/her teacher to look better. And art teachers--you do not pull another artist or teacher down in order to advance your own art importance.

Let's all enjoy the "Art" playground together!

“I am a Teacher.”
I am proud to be an art teacher. I love traveling across the country, teaching painting workshops. The painting shown, “Power Sea,” is the project I have selected for teaching in San Jose, California, on June 6 and 7 at Universal Art.

Claude Buck, my teacher, told about his art instruction received while attending the Grand Central Galleries School in New York, many years ago.

Claude was privileged to study with the fine classical artist, Emil Carlsen. Claude said that the teachers at the Grand Central School were all very protective of their students
and of their own knowledge and techniques. Claude described how Carlsen would place his palette in a desk drawer, and whenever people would enter his studio, he would shut the drawer so they couldn’t see the color mixtures upon his palette.

It was rather heartening that in spite of that background in secrecy, Claude was so giving of everything that he knew in art (and anything else.) One of his ways of passing on information to others was in his finished paintings. Upon turning the canvas around, the viewer is drawn to the symmetrical design that shows the basis of Claude’s composition. Also, next to the design can be found a list of all of the color mixtures used in the painting, complete with color samples of paint.

My thought this month is: If you are a teacher, then teach! Share! In other words, if you display a painting as a workshop-painting project, then don’t hold anything back in showing the students how to paint it. If you have a technique you want to keep secret, no problem, just don’t advertise that you will be teaching it as a project, and then shut the “desk drawer” on somebody who has paid to be taught the technique.