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Artist as teacher -- Everything can be made into art

By Chris Dungey
Posted Thursday, July 3, 2008

By Chris Dungey
VIEW Writer
LUM — We have all heard the old saw that asserts that those who can’t “do” are reduced to teaching. But Miriam Marcus is an instructor who also walks the walk as a working artist with paintings currently being shown at Sleeping Dragon Gallery in downtown Lapeer.

She has also shown at Buckham Gallery in Flint, and her work continues to explore a tension between the urban environments she is drawn to and the decidedly rural environment where she resides.

Miriam uses an empty church near her home in Lum as studio space, and is currently examining aspects of the local musicians she follows and supports: “I’m thinking about the Flemish artist Watteau, who showed the melancholic view of the clown performer,” she explains. “I’m interpreting that in my world of people who play music. I’m combining post-modern landscapes into some of those.”

Music has always been critical to her muse as well as a catalyst for her subject matter. “My first artistic impulse was moving to music as a child,” Miriam recalls. “I would spin until the world became a sphere that I was in the center of. I’ve worked to access that creative energy ever since.”

For years after completing her art education, she worked as the portrait artist of the Michigan Renaissance Festival. “All that practice contributed,” she says.

Besides Watteau, Miriam has been influenced by the Spanish masters El Greco, Goya, and Velasquez. She was recently reintroduced to the importance of those greats and was “blown away” by them on a trip to Europe with art students from Beecher High School where she teaches. “I also love Titian and Veronese,” she says. “I find contemporary art interesting now, though I used to be closed off to it. I’ve taken up the challenge of interpreting and deconstructing it as I’ve gotten older. My favorite living artist is probably Anselm Keifer.”

The scenes in Marcus’ work may be as straightforward and innocuous as an Air Stream trailer with chickens feeding beneath a clothesline in the yard, or diners in a café. Conversely, the pictures can be deeper and more demanding: An anatomically correct Eros spreads his wings over a barnyard full of abandoned cars — Saturns and Fieros. “I quoted, meaning borrowed, the Cupid figure from Caravaggio,” she notes.

Lately, she’s been doing most of her painting in oils on canvas or gouache (an opaque watercolor) on rag paper. “I’ve been doing a lot of collage recently too,” Marcus adds. “Assemblies of altered books and their covers. Whatever it is, I combine observation, sketches, and memory. I rarely use photographic references. You can’t replace working from life.”

Back in the classroom, Marcus is equally passionate about her other profession, believing that teaching art is an “art” itself. She brings her skills and inspirations to a school district north of Flint which has earned a reputation, deserved or not, that can accurately be termed “notorious.” Nevertheless, she counts herself “fortunate to have the job,” exploring paths of artistic expression with disadvantaged students, and “is not looking for another one.”

Marcus finds her students challenging, but has made it her first rule not to over-react to provocation or misbehavior. Nor does she want to judge origins of that behavior — she just doesn’t know what may be going on in the kids’ lives at home. She finds herself appalled at the general lack of hope they exhibit: “These kids feel that they’re despised by a society that would like them to just disappear,” she laments.

“Even the success of Barack Obama hasn’t encouraged them because they don’t believe he’ll be allowed to live. Combine that kind of despair with a constant barrage of television and Playstation violence, pernicious hip-hop materialism and rap violence in their ears from an iPod, and this is what we get — damaged and broken children.”

Further, Miriam believes her students have been deprived of the ability to play by those same caustic electronic influences. And, she insists that the consequences are not limited to Flint and Beecher: “We’re all in a dysfunctional system that encourages anti-social chaos and aggression,” she says. “We’ve offered them too few opportunities to try other tools.”

Her strategy is to make artistic tools available, to get her students to express themselves by “touching” the materials in a creative way: “I try to show that everything can be made into art. I bring whatever they might make use of from markers to finger paints; magazines to cut up for collage. We even have sewing machines,” she explains.

“I try to turn the world to another angle and show them a different view. I dance, sing, rap, rhyme, and bark. I may admit failure but not defeat. I take a nap when I get home, then come back the next day with another plan.”

The one shortage that the art students of Beecher High School can never despair of is the dedication of their teacher, the working artist Miriam Marcus.

More about Miriam Marcus
Age: 53
Hometown: Homewood, Illinois (south suburbs of Chicago)
In Lapeer Area: 20 years
Education: American Academy of Art, Chicago, MA from Wayne State, Teaching Degree and BFA from University of Michigan, Flint.
Occupation: art teacher, Beecher High School; Mott CC adjunct.
Marriage: divorced
Children: Aurora 25, Ray 22, Nina 17
Hobbies: hiking, cross-country skiing, reading, supporting local live music.