HAPPY MOTHERS DAY INTERVIEW: THE ARTIST & LECTURER JOAN SCHULZE



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THE ARTIST & LECTURER : JOAN SCHULZE


ART: "I am motivated to do it because I have had an experience that I have to somehow make visual."

TEACHING : " I think I've been an artist all my life. I come from the other side of the tracks in Chicago. When your in a big family you have to make a living, so your not going to choose art. No matter what, even if it's your hearts desire. So I choose to be a school teacher, because in that era you either were an airline stewardess, a nurse, a school teacher or you got married. Were talking about the late Forties & middle Fifties. When your a school teacher your using art every day. We had self contained classrooms and people would come to me and ask me to choose colors for them and I wondered why they were choosing me ? But, In retrospect, it must have been the way I ran my classrooms and how my children always did art. So I was an artist without portfolio & without stating it for the world, that came after I had children around 1970. "   

TRAINING: " The first teacher I had asked me, what my training was ? And I said, ' I don't have any training, I just do it '. She was my mentor from the get - go. Constance Howard.  She died at age Ninety-one. She was my second Mother, my ' Art Mother ' & always encouraged me to continue doing what I was doing. Every year she would come and have me show what I had been doing. Asking these really intricate questions. Because she wrote forty books & was the Head of Textiles & Design at Goldsmiths College, which is a major Art School in London, she was really giving me what I didn't get [formally], she was giving it to me in a very casual way and I took it. I ran with it. "