Who was your most influential teacher? Why?
My senior year art teacher had far more faith in me than I had ever experienced before. She pushed me out of my creative comfort zone and encouraged me to apply for art school.
My parents wanted me to do something I could more immediately turn into a job so I switched to teaching.
Miss D was still supportive but warned me “life would stop me from painting.”
During that final year of high school we noticed our cool art teacher lose a lot of weight. She looked unwell.
Did I ask her if she was okay?
I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I didn’t. I hadn’t been raised to feel I could consider myself an equal to a teacher. Even at 17, I saw myself as a child, unsure how to speak to adults.
I was certain that all adults knew what was what! it didn’t occur to me for one moment that a teacher might have a problem, let alone want to share it with a student.
Five years after I finished school, I bumped into her at a shopping mall. From memory, she seemed well. She asked me if I was painting. I was, but I didn’t consider myself an artist because I was designing and making giftware.
I wasn’t making art.
She asked me if I was married and I replied that I had been, and my husband had died.
‘Did you take his name,’ she said.
I said I had.
She said she was disappointed about that, that I should’ve kept my own name to build a career for myself.
I’m sure there were other niceties said during the conversation, but I know I walked away, feeling I had let her down. I also felt misunderstood. If I hadn’t taken my husband’s name when we married, I would have had nothing to show for it now that he was gone.
Jumping forward about another five years, I was sitting in my house one evening after I put my little son to bed. I had remarried and yes, I had taken his name. I was sitting at the dining table doing a jigsaw puzzle (it was of the Louvre pyramid from memory, all blue sky and golden glass. Very hard to do.)
A newsflash came on the TV. Honestly now when I think about that moment, it felt like a scene in a movie where the TV comes on to give the main character the information they need right then.
‘A teacher has lost her life in a housefire in Brisbane.’ And then they said my teachers name.
I couldn’t believe it. This was around 2004, before we had smart phones so I couldn’t look up what had happened or record it. Even now the incident doesn’t appear to be on Google, however I’m sure I could look it up on microfilm, Trove or the websites journalists and researchers use.
In that moment, I made a commitment to my teacher and my art and started painting again that week. This led to me being offered a job in the art department of an interior design company.
It is amazing how we so often wait for the bad news before making changes. I had (have) this very bad habit of not hearing the compliments and positive things people say, only responding to the kicks in the arse from the universe.
I need to change that. I guess my art teacher is still influencing me all these years later.
Vale Miss D. Thank you.
