Big Bend National Park

I have been to more than half a dozen national parks in the West: Grand Canyon, Bryce, Zion, Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Rocky Mountain to name a few. These annual summer camping trips no doubt inspired my childhood dream of becoming a forest ranger (I signed up to be a Junior Ranger at nearly every park) and later, in high school, to participate in an outdoor program where I led camping and backpacking trips for middle school students while teaching them wilderness skills and ethics. With the amount of gear I own sometimes I think I could be a model for REI.

Big Bend had somehow fallen to the bottom of the list, or perhaps in all honesty, was never on it. For one thing, the weather gets so hot there during the summer that the south side of the park pretty much shuts down. Maybe I didn't think Texas was capable of holding the same kind of breathtaking beauty I had found in Colorado, Arizona, Utah, and Wyoming. I certainly didn't think the state had mountains, and still, the highest peak is only 8,000 feet, nothing compared to the fourteeners of Colorado. But my perspective has changed; the park was beautiful and I can't remember the last time I could see stars all the way to the horizon. We camped at Chisos Basin, the only campground in the park nestled in the "mountains" and took day hikes. It's more than worth a repeat visit, next time maybe to backpack and kayak the Rio Grande (if there's still enough water).

Somewhere in the Middle of West Texas...

Little Pinky, where my mom and I stayed

there's a small quirky artist town called Marfa. To some, this town is known as just another place the hipsters flock to because it's the latest cool thing to do in a long list of trends soon to be forgotten. I'll admit, I did see a lot of them. As for me, I had no idea Marfa existed until my parents took a trip there a few years ago. And thus far, my adventurous free spirit has drawn me to some pretty interesting places...

I think it's my art school sensibility that made me find Marfa equally enticing and pleasantly amusing. Where I went to school, the definition of competitive sports was a recreational soccer team named The Black Lungs because everyone on the team was a smoker and a "cheerleading" squad named Rah Booty which was in reality a mixture of SNL-style improv and dance routines remarkably similar to Dance Dance Revolution. So the people and the energy of the town weren't all that shocking to me. I've seen as strange, if not stranger things having spent four years surrounded by these kinds of people, for in many ways, from a creative standpoint, they are part of my tribe.

Of course Marfa isn't all it's cracked up to be; as far as small towns go, it's pretty typical. But the quirks are in the details. We got to town around six in the evening and after a short happy hour we had a little trouble finding somewhere to eat, partly because it was late and partly because everything in town seems to open and close when they please. Maybe they're open. Maybe they're not. This restaurant is open this day, but not this day. They're usually open until this time but sometimes close early or stay open later... After a while I think this would be irritating, but in the short time we were there, it was just another thing I found amusing. The next morning we found Marfa Burrito, the kind of restaurant you wouldn't set foot in unless someone told you about it, but oh man was the food good. Ramona, the Hispanic woman who owns/runs the place doesn't speak English, so you're limited in what you order by the amount of Spanish you speak unless there's grandchild or a border patrol agent to help you.

We stayed in a trailer park/campground called El Cosmico. Looking around, I found that I couldn't stop laughing and smiling. The compound of vintage trailers, teepees, and safari tents shares a fence with the headquarters of the local border patrol. We rented Little Pinky, a small trailer painted a color I like to call Barbie pink. Pinky is just big enough for two people, though if you're over six feet tall you wouldn't be able to stand up straight. Off the deck is a shower and flush toilet, so it can feel more like "glamping" than camping.

From left to right: Kozy Coach, Vagabond, Branstrator

Royal Mansion, Spartan Mansion

yurt

teepees

Vagabond, Kozy Coach

Wagons to haul your stuff from the parking lot

Food Shark food truck

Dare Greatly

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. 

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, 

because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause;

who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly...”

-Theodore Roosevelt

Trust Your Compass

The sailor cannot see the North but knows the needle can.
Trust your compass.

-Emily Dickinson/Carl Kurtz

An Interview with Carl Kurtz

During my senior year at the Kansas City Art Institute, I had the privilege of interviewing Carl Kurtz, Professor in the School of the Foundation Year, for the school newsmagazine Ampersand.

Psalm 42:11, graphite on paper, 2009

Reciprocal Altruism, graphite on paper, 2010

Excerpted from the Ampersand interview, February 2010

Knowing that you have a design background, what is it about teaching Foundations that you like so much?

Foundation, its people, program and place are multi-faceted and complex. Here are a few of the things about Foundation that hold my attention:

To Teach Is To Serve
I think that teaching and being a (graphic) designer have a number of things in common. The most important are these: they are both oriented toward serving something other than the self; each is based upon order and discipline; and, they both offer direction. In addition to the sheer pleasure of it, I also indulge the belief that teaching has made a better student of me.

The Fountain of Youth
The Foundation building: Here the perennial age is ever the same, it varies little from year to year. Working with talented and dedicated beginning art students, is exactly where I belong.

Individuation
Because our program practices a high degree of individualized teaching there are a lot of unknowns involved in the educational process. A teaching/learning strategy or technique that helps one student does not necessarily work for another. New and relevant ways of connecting must always be sought and identified. I enjoy the search and working within this mystery.

Autonomy
I have a considerable amount of control over the design and implementation of my own curriculum (within a mutually agreed upon set of core visual issues, of course). I can adjust both the pace and, to some extent, the course content according to the character of each class. Having to follow some external guidelines or lesson plan for teaching would be anathema to me and inappropriate.

Unity Not Conformity
The Foundation program, in its diversity, is more organic than mechanical. It is a living, breathing thing that forges a path largely of its own making. Our program makes connections that deal more with the relatedness of things than with the separateness of things, integrating subject matter rather than isolating it.

Atmosphere
Stimulating, challenging and unpredictable.

Rhythm
The topics in our curriculum are various. The classes change regularly and fairly rapidly, every five weeks or so. Although this is sometimes abrupt, in general it suits my temperament. I like the changes. Additionally, there is an implicit urgency and importance this rhythm imparts to each subject.

Collegiality
One of the characteristics that I most enjoy in my colleagues is their insatiable desire to talk shop. It is a kind of verbal tinkering whose purpose, based on questioning, is always to make something just a little bit better, to replace something that is not working well or to invent some new way of teaching a lesson.

Pride
Although I do not believe that any individual has the right to take pride in another’s accomplishments, yet, after seeing so many of our students succeed in their ambitions and in their life, I find that I am also guilty of this, the most egregious sin of all.

Can you give us an overview of what it was like to be a student here?

I was a student of the graphic designer/teacher Rob Roy Kelly for the two academic years that I attended KCAI (1964-65 and 1965-66). Kelly’s educational objectives were very specific and large in their scope, consequently, he was a demanding teacher; he knew precisely what he was creating/building in the Graphic Design program at the Kansas City Art Institute and he set the expectation level for student achievement very high. To quote Kelly, “An effective educational program in Graphic Design is focused and intense.” There was absolutely nothing part-time about this teacher. At times his own intensity made for uncomfortable critiques, especially when our work did not arrive at his preferred destination. As students, we sometimes felt that we were overworked and under appreciated. We were expected to be in the studio at all times and were rebuked when we were not. Rob Roy Kelly was instrumental in initiating the Foundation program at this school. It was not until I entered the Foundation program as a teacher, many years later, that I more fully comprehended Rob’s lessons and the value of his pedagogy.

Although in most ways there seems to me little difference between yesterday’s student and the student of today, still there are some differences. America was at war then, and we are at war now. However, in the mid-1960’s, our country was polarizing making everything appear to be in relative stages of conflict. A state of general social unrest plus an unpopular war in Vietnam being fed by a draft captured the attention of nervous college students. Like an insatiable fire requiring ever more oxygen, anxiety was all consuming. Even though America is currently engaged in two foreign wars, and many, many people are injured and dying fighting in them, there does not seem to be much concern expressed about that fact by today’s students. Whereas the subject of war entered, if not dominated, a lot of our conversations during the 1960’s, today the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are hardly ever mentioned.

What kind of work are you doing now?

“Calligraphy: Disciplined freedom is the Essence of it [as of any other just form of government].” This quote by the calligrapher Ray DaBoll summarizes my approach to the forms of both calligraphy and teaching. While freedom (in expression) is the desirable end, freedom lies on the far side of discipline in this statement. It seems to me that all true discipline-based activities share this rule in common. Duke Ellington composed a wonderful little song that unites a concrete structure of the blues with an abstract idea of visual translucency that he titled, “Transblucency” (a kind of blue fog, as it has been described). It is a very short and tight composition but no matter how many times I listen to this melody, its magic never diminishes but is heightened with each hearing. (One critic commented about this song that it was so good an entire career could be built on it.) Instructive to me is his integral unification of seeming opposites: the structure is responsible for the spontaneity.

Words are both intellectual and visual subject matter for me, just as the natural landscape is the subject matter for the plein-aire painter, and the human body is subject matter for the figurative artist. When selecting which words to use, and for what purpose, I begin by making drawings of the words. Sometimes these drawings will be at considerable expense to the legibility of the words because of some form of physical manipulation and/or distortion exerted upon them. Though the work starts from something concrete, its final appearance may be a visual abstraction. The image dominates and the words are subordinate. I appreciate Hans Joachin-Burgert’s definition of calligraphy as “…a language of two dimensional form.”

What made you come back to KCAI to teach? What is it about the school that keeps you here?

In the spring of 1973, I was a participant in a photography show at the school’s exhibition space (“Second Annual KCAI Photography Invitational,” Charlotte Crosby Kemper Gallery). Following that exhibition, the Chairman of the Foundation Department, Steve Whitacre, and the Chairman of the Photography/Film Department, Lloyd Schnell, encouraged me to apply for a teaching position that was available in Foundation. I did apply, was eventually invited to fill the position, and began teaching in the fall of that same year.

The single factor most responsible for my being at the Art Institute is the belief in the critical importance of a strong educational experience at the first-year level; this is a shared belief and one which best defines the purpose of the School of the Foundation Year.

Carl Kurtz, 1942-2015

"The sailor cannot see the North, but knows the needle can. Trust your compass."

 -Emily Dickinson/Carl Kurtz

I found out yesterday one of the most inspirational instructors I encountered in college passed away. Though I never had Carl for a full semester, I had the pleasure of becoming one of his students during my three weeks of study abroad in South America where together we conquered mountains and rivers in Peru and Ecuador. The project for the trip was to make a book based on the experience. My photo essay book titled The Spiritual Landscape, presented images in three sections: Lands Untouched, Civilization, and People.

All I can say is during those three weeks and in the months following the trip, I came to understand that Carl saw me in a way few others do. What he loved and remembered about me was the way I got up every morning and smiled, even if the day before we had spent nearly ten hours hiking at least 17 miles on a incredibly challenging trail and arrived at camp in the dark. It was also the second chance; after I completed my book, he approached me with his kind heart and thoughtful prose and told me he knew I could do better. With that, he guided me in the production of a second, more beautiful and carefully crafted coffee table book. He believed in me and took the time to prove it to me.

"He loved people while teaching them or he taught people while loving them, I'm not sure. In the end, every student wanted to learn because they didn't want to let Carl down. He cared and they knew it."
-Brett Reif, Associate Professor and Director, School of the Foundation Year

We kept in touch sparingly after I graduated. I had intended to be in contact more often, as we all do with people who impact our lives in a meaningful way, but I fell into the trap. I waited, why, I'm not sure; there are no excuses. I had an email sitting in my drafts folder for over a year, long enough for things in my life to change so much that I had to delete most of what I had written and craft a new letter before finally sending it a few weeks ago (when I realized things were bad and time was running out). I will never forget his lessons, both in art and in life.

Creativity

"'I'm not very creative' doesn't work. There's no such thing as creative people and non-creative people. There are only people who use their creativity and people who don't. Unused creativity doesn't just disappear. It lives within us until it's expressed, neglected to death, or suffocated by resentment and fear."

-Brene Brown, The Gifts of Imperfection