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University Daily Kansan Wednesday, Jan. 9, 1963
Art Student Pulled Between The Muse and the Market
(The third and last in a series of an art department and students.)
Bv Rose Ellen Osborne
The student artist is puzzled about the future and unsure of his own talents.
"You draw a line and you put everybody in the world on one side and the artist on the other," one art student said.
The artist faces a double dilemma. He wants to paint and he wants to eat. For many, teaching offers a promise of putting daily bread on the table while providing complete freedom to paint.
"I CAME to college to get my masters so I can teach while I paint," one prospective artist said. "But do I have a real calling to teach? This is a question I ask myself."
After graduation the doctor, the lawyer, the journalist, all have jobs open to them in a professional world. But for the artist there are just two roads to follow.
"I can either take some kind of a job in which I have no interest at all to make a living or I can teach," Robert Price, Topeka graduate student, said.
Both student and faculty have at times questioned the desirability of painting teachers teaching painters to become teachers to teach more painters to become teachers.
"THE TWO ROLES are often contradictory," Richard Schira, drawing and painting instructor said. "You should be a painter first, but teaching often demands that you be a teacher first."
He explained that the art teacher becomes deeply involved with student psychology to motivate the student to do his best work. The art teacher's own painting then takes a secondary role.
But the art teacher can never quit painting if he wants to maintain contact with his students.
"It is a necessity that a painter is continually created." Robert Green,
associate professor of drawing and painting, said.
LIKE MOST OF his students Prof. Green is a firm believer in painting "art for art's sake." This belief takes the form of religion for the idealistic artist with "Thou shalt not paint to sell" heading his list of commandments.
"It is almost sacrilegious to paint to sell," Prof. Green said.
Student artist John Brewer, Lawrence senior, shares Prof. Green's views.
"To me recognition is secondary." Brewer said. "I'm not so interested in being seen as in supporting myself. But I have to maintain a certain amount of integrity about what I paint."
Brewer explained that to earn a living an artist sometimes paints mediocre paintings that he knows will sell because they appeal to a certain class of people.
This same attitude towards the problem of earning a daily living creates mixed emotions in the student's attitude towards exhibitions.
He scorns them as a purely commercial gimmick that takes the paintings out of their natural setting and lines them up before prospective buyers.
JIM SCHIROEDER. Colby sophomore, felt that an artist should enter exhibitions to build his reputation.
"If an artist shows at important places, people think he must be really doing something worthwhile. An artist who is recognized has a better chance of making a living by painting full-time," he said.
MOST WOULD rather paint than be able to make monthly payments on that new convertible with money earned on another job.
The KU art student hates conformity and is individualistic in his dress on campus, but not just because he is a non-conformist.
"People see artists in paint-stained jeans and sweatshirts on campus and they notice him. They forget that the artist goes to class in his work clothes," a student artist said.
He added that artists were proud of their profession and liked having people recognize them for what they are.
IN SPITE OF the popular myth about artists and free love many KU art majors are married.
Some feel that this is why such numbers are entering the teaching profession. Teaching affords the artist security and added status in the community.
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Dance to Discuss New Condon Book
FORUM ROOM OF UNION
"Manchurian Candidate," a novel written by Richard Condon and recently adapted to a movie, will be discussed at 4:30 p.m. today.
Frank Dance, professor of speech and drama, will analyze the book, its reviews and its message in the Music and Browsing Room of the Kansas Union.
"I don't discount many of the ideas professed in the book, which some people called impossible," he says.
"In some ways Condon's writing reminds me of the writing of H. G. W. Dance said. "This is one of the ideas that I will pursue in the forum."
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