Archive for category Illustration

You never know how much of an impact you are having on the world you live in. Live a quiet peaceful life and although everything doesn’t work out as well as you would like for it to work out, you have an amazing impact on the people who’s lives you touch. I’ve not in my short life so far been impacted as much by this reality as I have been this past year. After losing my job in Chicago I moved back close to my home town in Tampa, Florida, and in the move I’ve re-connected with many friends and family who have impacted my life profoundly over the years.

Most of the people who have had the largest impact in my life have done so in similar ways as my art teacher from high-school. He was a completely different kind of “teacher” than any I had experienced before. He had a formal lesson plan for the year, every year, but when a student in his class showed some level of both talent and desire to learn, instead of making us conform to the lesson plan he laid out for the year he allowed us to develop our own plan of action with some mutual advice from him and his experience in working with the educational system. Especially in 11th and 12th grades while we were preparing to go off to college and develop some form of a career. Instead of forcing us to succumb to tests and evaluations he allowed us to find what our talents would uncover by the natural progression of being surrounded by artistic inspiration and competition.

Competition was a key for me, I loved to win. I wasn’t much of a person in the athletic arena, I weighed only 110lbs from 9th grade until I was about 26 years old. But put a piece of paper in front of me, or a piece of chalk, or even a pencil and a napkin, and I will demand the attention of everyone around me by creating something out of nothing. I have always loved to do that. It actually began all the way back in 5th grade when I began drawing cartoons on the playground – the girls all wanted me to do a drawing for them – and I very quickly realized that this was a much less painful method of wooing the girls than the athletic competition happening on the jungle gym or the football or baseball fields. Don’t get me wrong I was pretty decent in most sports and played baseball, football, ran track and took Shotokan for several years. But I was never one of the best at any of those things and I always felt that God put me here to be the best at something. Not just one of those guys on the team, there was somewhere that I was supposed to be the captain, the leader, the president and something inside me would settle for nothing less. Of course after high school I have yet to become the president of anything substantial, but I am still searching!

Mr Verge’s teaching style was incredibly refreshing, we actually used to sneak out of other classes by forging notes claiming to be from Mr. Verge and go to his class to work on whatever piece we were working on at the time. How many students do you know that skip school or classes – not to leave school and get into some kind of mischief – but to go to another classroom to work on a project for college entrances and scholarship competitions? Mr. Verge created an atmosphere of comfort and freedom that didn’t exist in most other places. My father didn’t understand the value of that freedom until the end of 11th grade when I began wining competitions worth money! But he eventually came around and became a huge advocate for my career.

It took me almost 25 years to come back home and reconnect with Mr. Verge and many of the students from those days in school. Now I find out that I was only one of many many students that thrived under Mr. Verge’s unique style. Florida’s educational system will have a very large void to fill indeed after he retires from teaching!

Thank you Mr. Verge for giving all of your students over the years such a welcome place of solitude and freedom for all of us to find ourselves. We all owe you a great deal…. http://suncoastpasco.tbo.com/content/2010/may/18/190000/pe-students-frame-a-perfect-ending-for-art-teacher/