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TRAVERSE CITY RECORD-EAGLE August 10, 2005
Art Teachers Offer Deeper Living
BY VINCENT HANCOCK
Special to the Record-Eagle
If you visit the home of Craig Fleuter’s parents, you won’t find their son’s art on the living room walls. He was certainly been asked for a painting or two, but the requests have come with strings attached: couldn’t they have browns and oranges in them?
Fleuter, K-8 Art instructor at Interlochen Pathfinder School, doesn’t seem bothered by the question. He understands and is grateful for his parents’ constant encouragement of his art. It’s just that his work has led him past the point of decoration. “I try to come up with something that has a soul,” he said.
It’s an effort lost on many, but Fleuter is one of many local art teachers hoping to introduce students to the potential of the arts. It’s not always easy. Mass-produced faucets, wristwatches and perfume bottles have claimed to share the mantle of art in the last century. Now, one can purchase furniture color-coordinated with framed prints.
Journalist Walter Lippmann, writing in 1916, described the element missing from commercial art, no matter how pretty: the stimulation of emotion. “These things,” he wrote, “are often good carpets and good trimmings, but men pray on a rug, not to it; we have been given better clothes, but we are naked.” Art, Lippmann said, promises a path out of ordinary living, by which people “can live a thousand lives, lift the roofs off houses, open sealed caskets, and see the other side of the moon.”
As the final weeks of summer vacation slip by, Traverse area instructors are preparing the path by restocking their supplies, rearranging their classrooms, and wrestling with their own creations. Craig Fleuter is struggling to devote more time to a paint-
ing, begun years ago, of his sons in a canoe. “You have to recharge yourself,” he said.
Once energized, he brings his experience and enthusiasm to his students. He demonstrates how materials have been used by past artists and his students discover the strengths and limits of each medium. Through art, Fleuter teaches the value of discipline, a lesson he learned for himself when he decided to study the human face, once a difficult subject to render. Spontaneity reigns, too, when he opens the entire stockroom to his students’ disposal. Rope, fabric, Styrofoam and beads spill out, and Fleuter almost has to drag the students out when the period comes to an end.
Pathfinder’s Curriculum Coordinator, Duncan Sprattmoran, encourages such an energetic approach. It’s one way of keeping society from stifling the expressive spark. “Five-year-olds will fingerpaint with absolute abandon,” he said. “But we socialize them away from that. We tell them not to dance on the street.”
To counter these forces, Sprattmoran incorporates the arts into all subject areas, so students express their understanding of key concepts. Post-Civil War history, for instance, is illustrated by the arts. “For our unit on the 1880s, I’ll bring in poetry and literature of the time,” he said. “We’ll look at the themes of justice and freedom and they’ll write about that.
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