Necessity....the Mother of Invention
or how I survived being a private school teacher
Happy 2025 Everyone!
It is commonly known that putting constraints or even severe limits upon a task encourages creativity.
I taught at a beautiful, gorgeously appointed, historic, spacious, high-achieving private boarding school for 26 years. I taught a full slate of art and art history classes from Grades 9-12 but in boarding schools all teachers are also required to take on a number of other duties involving supervising and coaching sports, arts, and a host of extra monitoring duties.
At one point, one of my duties was organizing and supervising the detention system for the school. This system was historically called ‘Quarters’, with one quarter equaling a tax or penalty of 15 minutes, a quarter of an hour.
The school was very well run, with great morale in both the teaching faculty and student body. Students generally loved the school; they appreciated and understood the sacrifice their parents had made for them to attend this expensive and beautiful school with so many academic and life experience opportunities. It was not unusual for day-student parents to complain that their child didn’t want to come home at the end of the school day, and would prefer to do activities on campus until very late in the evening.
It was a busy place where students shouldered a great amount of responsibility, and while they were generally happy with their lot, I don’t imagine school life was all that easy for them. The day started with compulsory chapel/assembly. The religious base was Anglican historically, but the services were non-denominational, and dealt with a wide range of spiritual and philosophical issues. Chapel was actually a great morale builder for the school, and I say this as a person who is not Christian and rather repulsed by ALL organized religions. All the activities, wins, losses of the sports teams and away trips were celebrated here, with student skits often hilariously punctuating the proceedings.
All that said, chapel was compulsory and started at 8:00 am. And what student wouldn’t prefer to sleep in from time to time, or often? Proper school uniforms where worn at all times of the academic day including chapel. And what student wouldn’t want to take liberties with a dress rule? Yes, there were rules, for all aspects of school life including dress code, lateness, bed times, absence, deportment and behavior, so often the quarters list would be long…3 or 4 pages or more! So that was sometimes enough students to fill 2 or 3 big classrooms for an hour. And yes, during a quarters sit, students were required to do school work.
And obviously quarters were not popular, because who in their right mind wants to have their free time taxed in an already extremely busy schedule? Especially at a time right after supper and right before a compulsory block of evening study in the student dormitories lasting another 2 hours!
So, certain individuals often became regulars, because it was hard for them to do all these school required things in the proper way. And sometimes some arrived with some attitude and would look for ways to game the system.
This is where I enter. At a certain point my assistants and I would come to recognize which students could be trusted to sit and work quietly in a room without supervision, and which ones might benefit from some oversight.
The ‘oversight’ room was my room. It’s a bit like herding cats trying to keep the lid on a room of 16 year olds who would much prefer to be somewhere else. So….best to figure something out. The first thing I figured out was……being a policeman sucks!! Well I sure didn’t feel like doing that. To diffuse a potentially inhospitable situation I would bring in paints, oil pastels, a drawing board, and I would select one student who was there for 4 quarters (1 hour), and was maybe a bit jumpy, to sit for a portrait. So I’m drawing and staring at this kid for an hour, and everyone else in the room gets to watch this, or quietly work.
Of course seeing people paint was not news to my art students, but the vast majority of these students were not art students, so this was new to them, somewhat of an interesting experience, and even amusing. I would hold the work up and show it a few times during the painting process. They would be interested in this, and would also be interested in the reactions of the student being painted. The way I paint is often a bit violent, not gentle at all, sometimes the scrubbing with materials gets intense, and I move around a fair bit. They got to see the process of how these things get made. If a quarters student got sick of doing their homework, they would watch me.
Making art and showing the students the art solved the discipline issue in the quarters rooms. It changed the dynamic from me being there to police them. Instead I was there to do my work, and they were partnered into this to a degree.
Each drawing took about an hour or a bit less. It definitely had to be finished in an hour because that’s how long the quarters sits were. I’d put the drawing board up in the room after I was done to study the piece, and I think people got the idea that the looking is very much a part of making art.
We also had beautiful art studios with many tall walls and display areas, so after the sits I’d also post a whole row of these drawings in the art rooms, for my art students and visitors to see. Sometimes the quarters kids would come down to the art rooms to see their portraits again. I also designed a Grade 10 art class project based on these pieces.
These were all done on 20 x 26 inch sheets of ochre paper. In retrospect I’m really sorry I don’t use a proper archival paper. The materials are black grease pencil and oil pastel. I loved drawing with the black grease pencil, and would often go back into the drawing with that at the end of the piece.
Each drawing had the student’s complete name which I’d hand written in the left lower corner. I’ve gone in and digitally removed those names from each drawing, to protect the student’s privacy, even though I doubt they would object.
I did a whole lot of these and I’m thinking that I may do some self portraits this size with these materials.
And then I also invented this painting format during the quarters sits. I made this painting just a few days ago, and I’m still very often using this exact method and size all these years hence. For the quarters sits I needed a format and materials that were easily transportable to the detention rooms, which were a bit of distance away from my art studios. These are archival papers, 11 x 15 inches, with a hand-drawn pencil border. Again, the painting had to finished within an hour. I’d work from invention, or from a brief pencil diagram made during my commutes to and from school, or from photo images I’d shoot and download to my laptop.
Whereas the portrait drawings were done on a big drawing board raised up, these were done on a small drawing board laid flat on a desk, with my acrylic painting materials spread around me, and I’d paint while standing. The advantage for the quarters sit in this case was that since I’m at a desk at the front of the room, teacher style, all the students are sitting at desks facing me and can very easily see what I’m doing, how I’m mixing paints, how the brush works the surface, and even to a degree how I’m making decisions in the work.
At the end of the painting I would also use up the remaining paint making collage sheets, usually a messy active experience, so that was potentially fun for them to watch also.
You never have perfect freedom. And probably there is no such thing. But you can do some creative, wonderful things when the limits and constraints on a task get tighter. And maybe that’s the point of this little photo essay. You can use whatever gifts you have, get inventive with just a few materials in a tight situation, to help yourself cope, and maybe even shine.
Happily, the Canada Post strike is over, and I’m very thankful to the great company Chitchats for shipping artwork within Canada and the USA so effectively in the interim. My new work is always posted daily to my 2 sites:
That sounds like the perfect art class, watching an artist perform their process right in front of them. How many of these kids deliberately broke the rules just so they could watch you work? I think I would have.
Terrific portraits and what a fascinating narrative of how they ( and your small format work ) came to be. Thanks for this window into the background of your creative process. Lucky students!