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Seth Thomas profiles a long-time art teacher whose influence has gone far beyond his classroom.
The trees are on wheels. There are two of them on stage, constructed from PVC piping, cardboard boxes, plastic bags, duct tape, papier-mâché, and paint. Camo netting drapes over the entire contraption, coating the branches with faux leaves. To the left of the stage is a young boy’s room complete with posters hanging above his bed. In the background, a stairwell has been transformed into a cobblestone castle adorned with royal banners. To the right, slabs of Styrofoam have been etched and painted gray to form the Cliffs of Insanity, the location of the dynamic battle between master swordsman Inigo Montoya and Westley, who’s currently disguised as a masked pirate. Patrick Sullivan’s art students have helped create this world, and currently he’s in the pit orchestra hammering on his guitar as two teenage actors brandish toy rapiers and fight on stage.
The Warrensburg High School musical adaptation of the 1987 fantasy/adventure film “The Princess Bride” was the product of mastermind James Corriveau. He tweaked the original script, ramping up the comedy and adding rock opera segments. Songs by Amy Winehouse, Peter Gabriel and Queen are recontextualized to enhance the plot. At one point, well over two dozen students are on stage in medieval garb singing and dancing to The Spencer Davis Group’s 1966 hit “Gimme Some Lovin’.” When Pat said that the play involves the whole school, he meant it.
The two swordsmen pause during their lengthy battle to dance briefly to the pit band’s upbeat tango music. The audience, packed tight in the auditorium for Saturday’s show, cheers.
*****
When you walk into the art room in this upstate New York school, you’re met with a welcoming committee of cartoon characters. On one cupboard, there’s a painting of Thor standing aloft a storm cloud, raising his hammer, Mjölnir, overhead as a lightning bolt fills the night sky around him. Super Mario and an entourage of smiling Pokémon adorn the ceiling tiles overhead. The doors of a nearby closet depict Aladdin and Princess Jasmine riding a magic carpet, hovering above minarets in the fictional Middle Eastern city of Agrabah. Added to this welcoming committee is the art teacher, Mr. Sullivan, or as I know him, Pat. Or, as his older students call him, Sully.
He’s been a fixture here since the 1987-88 school year. Since that time, his name was added to a placard hanging in the school’s lobby commemorating his 25 years of service. This morning, his first period students are shuffling in as if they’ve been cast as undead extras in a George A. Romero movie. It’s at this time that Pat, in his soft-spoken and wizened voice, gives me his job description: “I’m everything from an art teacher to a guidance counselor to a therapist.”
The way in which he orders that list implies a hierarchy. I would come to find that many of students — both current and former — would likely take that list and reverse its order.
*****
Pat attended college for art — a seemingly odd choice considering his high school didn’t even have an art department. Pat’s interest stemmed from his parents. His mother had attended New York City’s Pratt Institute during The Great Depression, quitting a year later when she ran out of money. His father, a shopkeeper, would make signs for other businesses around his hometown of Northcreek. The portfolio he submitted to SUNY New Paltz was made on his own time.
“In the early ‘70s, it was all about free creativity. It was post-Woodstock. ‘Develop the inner child’ and all that crap. There wasn’t enough structure that I remember.”
After becoming certified, he worked as a student teacher and eventually landed a gig presenting government-funded art shows to high schools. “I had to figure out what was important about these things, and that was probably some of the best training I had.” Not long after this, he found his first teaching job.
*****
By the time a student became a freshmen at St. Mary’s Catholic School, they were already well aware that every nun had a nickname. They were referenced like Snow White’s seven dwarves — a prominent feature became an alias. Stony was deaf. If you were out of line, Spike would strike you. Dizzy couldn’t see worth a damn and wore Coke-bottle glasses. But, Laurie Orsini, one of Pat’s first students, felt like she had it easier than her five older siblings. By the time she arrived in the late ‘70s, the staff was aging, and many of the nuns were being replaced with underpaid lay-teachers.
St. Mary’s was divided in half — one side for the elementary school and the other for the older kids. Pat’s first art room was in the basement, down a long hallway and across from the elementary side’s lunch room. This cafeteria was affectionately referred to as “senior lounge.” After the little kids cleared out, older students would occupy the room and could order a grilled bun with peanut butter. It, in conjunction with the art room, formed something of an oasis from the rest of the building where your behavior was monitored under the watchful eye of the Lord and His flock.
Laurie remembers the art room as a messy smattering of still life objects, papers and supplies. “I feel like an art room that isn’t cluttered, isn’t very inspirational.”
She remembers that Pat had command over the room, not out of rank or terror, but out of respect. “When I went in there, he was my teacher, but I didn’t feel like we were on different levels. He respected whatever talent I had for what it was, and kids that were in there that maybe weren’t really talented — he had as much respect for them, too. It’s a stark contrast to what goes on in high school. It was a comfortable place to be.”
The pay was lousy, but Pat felt St. Mary’s gave him a good grounding in teaching. He stayed there for nine years before for a brief stint at North Warren. Two-and-a-half years later, he was hired by Warrensburg.
*****
There are fewer than 400 students here. A minority of them are art students, many frequent fliers returning to his classroom year after year. Throughout the day, Pat says things like:
I’m going to expect a lot more shading on your next project.
You get the table clean.
Get to work, kiddo.
A little quieter, please!
When a student announces that they forgot their homework, he retorts, “Write yourself a note and tape it on your forehead. Bring it in tomorrow.” He says these things like a father, not necessarily scolding the students. He just expects more from them.
He’s frequently approached for guidance and can easily transform his opinion into a teachable moment. When a student asks him to examine her drawing of a horse adorned with feathers in its mane, he asks, “What do you want this to say other than ‘I like horses’?” He points out the blank background and offers options, launching into a discussion of the way Dutch 17th-century painters captured large billowing clouds “to show how insignificant humans are.”
During fourth period, a young student plops down at her table with a harumph, whips out her cell phone and announces that she’s just not feeling it today. Pat — or, perhaps more accurately, Mr. Sullivan — doesn’t miss a beat, “So, tomorrow we’ll start on production.” He says this in an impossible tone, capturing the nuances and inflection of an understanding friend and an authoritative figure. Mr. Sullivan doesn’t walk the line between light-hearted and stern, he embodies it. It’s hard to imagine a student crossing him, not for fear of punishment, but for fear of letting him down. When I overhear this exchange, I haven’t a doubt that production will, indeed, start tomorrow.
In a later class, a student sighs at their work and opines, “This looks like a jumbled mess.”
Mr. Sullivan smiles back. “That’s alright.”
*****
When Pat arrived at Warrensburg in the late ‘80s, he found himself replacing the old guard — just as he had at St. Mary’s. Cammie Simmes (then Cammie Sprague) remembers the former art teacher as highly conventional. That instructor had descended from the ‘glue and popsicle sticks’ generation of high school art; less technical skill and more arts-n-crafts. Of course, this could have been an issue of funding. The school didn’t even have a theater department in those days.
Nevertheless, Mr. Sullivan’s approach to art was transformative for the school. He brought new projects, different techniques and a modern way of approaching art. Inspired by the 1988 Summer Olympics, he created a rubric for grading his students that echoed the way judges rated divers. Students scored in categories like “degree of difficulty,” “technical accuracy” and “craftsmanship.” It was a way to access the subjective and bridge the gap between the novice and the kid with natural born talent.
Cammie, a dancer and diehard fan of the Molly Ringwald movies of the era, would show up to class in a T-Shirt and tutu and paint.
It gave her respite from the caustic world of cliquey girls in a small-town high school. “He was like a saving grace to a lot of us.”
One of Cammie’s paintings has been hanging in the hallway for 24 years. It’s a green and blue mountain landscape. Thick layers of modeling paste push the primary focus, a tree buckling in the wind, out of the page toward the viewer. Despite her artwork achieving a place in the school’s permanent collection, she feels that Mr. Sullivan’s leadership skills stem from his ability to treat everyone equally. “He could care less if you couldn’t draw a straight line. He would find something you’re good at.” And by working with everyone, he gave a lot of kids confidence. “You could just be yourself in there.”
Cammie graduated in 1990. Two years later, the school went through a massive renovation, and Pat helped design the floor plan of his room, making it the cluttered, inspiring place it is today.
*****
Considering how adored he is by his students — both current and former — I was shocked to hear that Patrick Sullivan hated high school. It began in the fifth grade, when he had a teacher whom he describes as horrible. “He would make fun of kids in class, and he was physically abusive.” When a friend plagiarized on a paper, the teacher marched up to his seat and slammed the student’s head against the wall. Back in the ‘60s, nobody said anything.
“I remember my fifth grade teacher walking by — we were taking notes on something — and I, of course, had been drawing in the margins of my notebook because that’s the way I pay attention. He looked at the doodles and said, ‘Work on your notes. You’ll never get anywhere doing that stuff.’”
Pat later felt sensitive to teachers not supporting him because of his experience in the fifth grade. “It started the progression that continued in high school. I became an easier target because I reacted to it.”
Perhaps that’s why students across the decades have noted his teaching style as one of mutual respect and remember his art room fondly. As Laurie put it, “Everybody was on the same level. Once kids have that level of equality, it takes away that edge.”
“He didn’t demand respect, but you had a great respect for him,” Cammie notes. Even though she didn’t get along very well with her classmates, she considered the art room a “safe zone.”
I remarked to one of Pat’s current students that it seemed like everyone was being nice to one another — it was much different from how I remembered school. They quickly corrected my assertion, “It’s only in this room; it’s nowhere else.”
A student sitting nearby chimed in, “If you’re mean, Sully will kick you out.”
*****
On the night of the play, before Buttercup and Westley met, fell in love, fell out of love and fell back in love, I was in Pat’s art room with his family. As we were laying our coats down on the art tables, and Pat was organizing his guitars, I caught a glimpse of a student’s work resting by the windowsill. It was a four-panel piece arranged on one giant sheet of paper. A student had sculpted a sunflower out from a rubber mat and transferred the image using a roller and golden yellow printing ink. It was created by the girl from the week before who, at the time, just wasn’t feeling it.
Initially, when I overheard that exchange, I thought Pat would scold her and tell her to get to work. Instead he let her do what she needed to do at that moment: be a teenager. And, in his infinite wisdom, allowing her the space to do so is likely what inspired her to begin production the next day.
Perhaps his negative experience as a student has enabled him to rewrite high school. “To some extent,” Pat offered as the school day drew to a close, “maybe this is good therapy for me.”
—Photo Colleen/Flickr
The post Only in This Room: Lessons from an Art Teacher appeared first on The Good Men Project.