Keiko Hara was a constant source of stress for me when I was a fine arts major at Whitman. Even before I had a class with her, I heard stories of her insanity. As a professor, she was crazy and unpredictable; a combination of less-than-stellar English skills and her general verbal ineptitude caused frustration for us even trying to understand what she was telling us to do. If that wasn’t bad enough, it always has seemed to me that taking art from an artist whose art you dislike is just asking for trouble.
Keiko became a source of ridicule to some of my fellow students and me. We hated how confusing her classes were and we couldn’t understand the point of many of her exercises, so we’d make fun of her in ways she couldn’t understand; her poor English led to expressions which became humorous catchphrases to us, phrases like, “Can you come?”, “Really kind of,” and “Are you the sweat?” We even made up several corresponding hand signs, and would perform these clandestinely whenever she uttered one of these catchphrases. Once, she accidentally locked herself out of her office, and called me (since I was working in a helpdesk position) for assistance. There was nothing I could do, and I told her to call security; but as soon as I’d hung up the phone, I snickered up my sleeve in a gesture of pure schadenfreude, and quickly told the story to my fellow students.
She was a horrible teacher. I thought at the time she was a horrible artist. I thought her classes were a waste of time and money. I tried for awhile to think generously and get something out of those classes, thinking that even if she was a horrible teacher, I would still be able to glean something from enforced studio time and the resources provided by those classes. This was true to a certain extent, but I was discouraged by the fact that works that I intentionally made to be (what I considered) artsy-fartsy — paint thrown at paper and then ripped up and reassembled without any purpose — were things which she absolutely loved, while the works which I poured my heart, soul, and effort into, she criticized as being too tight, too controlled.
But I wish I’d paid more attention to her art. If I had looked at it closer, or as an artist, rather than as an amateur viewer, I might have been able to understand her better. Now, several years since the last time I had a class with her, I find myself looking at her art — especially drawn to her Verse series, work she’s done in the time since I knew her — and feeling like I can understand better what she was trying to accomplish with us. I actually like it quite a bit. But I couldn’t appreciate her use of color until I’d learned just how hard a good sense of color is to achieve, especially with oils. I couldn’t appreciate her technique until I’d learned how to handle oil paints.
Expressions like “draw the air” were fodder for our ridicule, but just because we didn’t get what she was trying to say, it doesn’t mean that she didn’t have something to say. Many artists have managed to imbue space with a physicality through various techniques — many of the Impressionists did this especially with optical blending and brush stroke techniques — but we didn’t get it.
She tried to get us to embrace the physical act of creating art, to work ourselves up into it and open ourselves. Although I still don’t see it as a weakness, she was right: my own work has always been very painstakingly controlled, tight, closed; but even when I was still at school, I started to realize the value of physical exhausting yourself to create a work of art, or even just to warm yourself up so that you can extend yourself. It’s not necessarily about “being the sweat,” and maybe the result won’t be anything you’d want to hang on your wall — but the flow of a line is entirely dictated by the energy and freedom (or lack thereof) which is poured into it, and you can easily tell where it starts and stops from the finished product, when there’s energy and when there isn’t.
I wish her methods had been easier to follow, so that I could have understood her message. I was miserable at the time, but I think that there was value in her teaching, nestled in amongst the suffering, the sweat, and the mockery, waiting a few years ’til I’d matured a bit in my pursuit of art so that it could jump out at me like a maggot in cheese. Not that she made it easy, but I should have listened harder. I might be a better artist now, and it would’ve been much more charitable at the time.
