Caught unawares by the 19th Century 

    I was eleven years old in 1957 and lived on the prairie east of Edmonton.  Growing up in rural Alberta gave me two gifts: I know how to find duck nests hidden in the cattails around sloughs and how to snag gophers with a twenty-foot piece of string that you first must drag down a dirt road in order to shed the store-bought smell.  I went to a two-room school named Clover Bar #13 whose single cultural advantage was a set of Encyclopedia Britannica, played hockey on those same sloughs during the Winter, and each Saturday morning had an art lesson at the Shepy International School of Art.  Professor Alexander Shepy, who had emigrated from the Baltic States after World War II, presided over the school as a Master in the grand European tradition, dressed in a blue painter's smock and black plastic bow tie.  Each Saturday morning was like falling though a hole in Time-Space and landing in Paris during the 1880s.

       My mother drove me into downtown Edmonton to a two-story office building on 101 street.  Up a flight of stairs and a right turn down a hallway past several rooms where women looked up from their sewing.  Just where the hallway floor sagged you stepped into an sour cloud of turpentine: The floor, the walls, everything had been splashed with turpentine.  The first room on the right was the children's room where beginners sat at small desks laboring with chalks and watercolors.  To show his allegiance to Canada, Shepy had painted a portrait of Queen Elizabeth on the far wall.  I did my first chalk drawing, which portrayed a squirrel sitting on a tree branch, directly under the nose of Queen Elizabeth.  Down the hallway on the right was the adult's room where older students painted oils.  Their easels were nailed to the four walls creating a perimeter surrounding, but facing away from, the model's platform in the middle of the room.  Adults had classes at night during the week and they could set up their easels as they pleased.

    Off the hallway to the left Shepy sat at wooden desk in the middle of his storehouse of European culture, art books and art prints. During those five years, I was in his office only twice.  The first time I sat on a hard wooden chair and stared at the heroic Greek statue on the corner of his desk that had been knocked to the floor during an evening soiree and was now decorated with shatter lines and glue streaks.  Shepy told me that I was ready to move up to the adult's room.  He gave me a wooden paint box with three brushes (two stiff hog hair brushes and a sable blending brush), his choice of oil paints (white was always zinc white and red was always rose madder) and an oval wooden palette.  Carrying my paint box, I followed him into the adult's room where he pointed to the second easel on the right-hand side, near the door.  I was a little disappointed because I wanted to sit at an easel deep in the middle of the room, not the second easel near the door.  But at last I had arrived.  I was twelve years old and ready to begin my education as painter.

      In this 19th Century world, painting was a craft that required work and study.  You might possess innate talent or some other advantage of birth,  but Shepy was there to teach you your craft.  One started at the beginning, which meant that parachuting into watercolor class for a week or two of recreation and amusement was unheard of.  You began with chalk drawing because chalks are cheap and indestructible in the hands of children, and because drawing trains your eye. You graduated to watercolors, and after passing a mastery test of watercolor technique, you moved up to the adult room and on to oils, charcoal/conte crayon/pastels and finally clay sculpture. 

        When I arrived in the adult's room, the star of our class was working on a charcoal portrait of a gas station attendant (big angular jaw, smile, prominent cheek bones and a cap with a brim).  I watched him create shade effects and then pierce the shade with a sharp black line, and all I could see in his hand was a shapeless piece of charcoal.  Reaching clay sculpture meant that you had spent years moving through the various disciplines.  There was a young woman who had matriculated that far and who breezed into our class about midday Saturday, saying hello to everyone and taking her sculpture out of a cupboard.   Since our easels were nailed to the wall, the older students walked the row behind our backs, encouraging us but also pointing to messy patches in our paintings.  Occasionally technical obstacles were negotiated: One day the sculpture lady lifted a canvas off an easel and judged the thickness of the paint by examining the canvas edge wise.  I had never seen anyone do that - I crouched in front of my easel and tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible in this highly charged environment of craft expertise.

        Want to graduate out of watercolors and move on to oil paint?  Take a piece of watercolor paper and, using a ruler, draw a tall rectangle three inches wide and nine inches tall.  Prepare three pools of primary colors: red, yellow and blue.  Begin laying pure red at the top of the rectangle, sweeping from side to side, but never going beyond the edge of the rectangle.  Next, dilute the red and introduce yellow; this will create orange.  Then introduce more yellow until at the middle of the tall rectangle there is a band of pure yellow.  Now dilute the yellow and introduce blue; this will create green.  Then finally, more blue until at the very bottom of the rectangle there is a band of pure blue.

            Go outside the rectangle, do it again.

            If the band of pure yellow is not in the middle of the rectangle, do it again.

            If there isn't enough orange, do it again.

            If there isn't enough green, do it again.

    My first five or six attempts were sloppy and lacked color balance.  After several hours of struggle I had arrived at the there's only one thing wrong with it stage.  Re-applying myself next week I achieved a series of good ones; Shepy examined the half dozen perfect ones scattered on the table.  I was ready to move on.
    As I write this sentence fifty years later I can look up and see the wooden paint box that Shepy gave me.  Part of his legacy is internalized: It's how I sweep my hand over my paint brushes, assessing the size, shape and stiffness, because I select a brush by feel.  I recognize Shepy when I sound like Shepy: One of my own students was painting water with up and down strokes...I had to reach out and stop his hand.  "Move your hand like water," I told him, "hold the brush like water."  Telling someone to move his hand like water or to hold a brush like water doesn't make sense, but it symbolizes the internalized nature of craft.  When I hold my student's hand in my hand and we move the brush together to create the illusion of water, Shepy is there.         
        But there are other parts of Shepy's legacy that are not internalized:

The reporter noted that Gerome visited the atelier to review the students' work regularly, twice a week, an exceptional diligence among the atelier professors. He examines the work of each student with the greatest care, but also with the greatest severity. He doesn't flatter. You don't await an encouraging word from him unless it is really merited. On the the hand, one can often hear, "that's bad, that's not it', as he walks past the academies [drawings after a nude model]. He never laughs. He smiles rarely, and his smile is more ironic than benevolent. You can't tell his favourites among the pupils, for he treats them all alike. This severity and this coldness do not hurt him at the Ecole, he is the master the most loved and the most obeyed. (Ackerman)

Life's writers, however, ignored the discipline and conscious direction clearly evident in the photographs.  They proceeded to heighten the novelty of Pollock's procedures with the caption 'Pollock drools enamel paint on canvas' and with the verbs 'dribbles,' 'scrawls,' and 'scoops' in the text of the article itself.  This vocabulary confused Pollock primitivism with careless drawing.  (Cox)