The Art of Teaching...

…or how to teach art to teenagers.

Taken @ National Gallery London

My art teacher, Aleksei Alexandrovich, spent twenty-five years teaching, reading, and writing about art, yet throughout it all, he understood nothing about it. The thirteen-year-olds, like me, could sense it - especially when he took us on our monthly school trips to Moscow’s art galleries in the late 90's

During those trips, he resembled an actor who pretended to be an art teacher. Once in the art gallery, he always spoke in a much louder voice than was required. He also used a high-pitched intonation which we only heard from him during those school trips. He had a habit of stopping at the leaflet stands, at the gallery’s entrance, to tell us that once — ten or fifteen years ago — he co-curated an exhibition in some remote gallery in Russia that none of us young teens had never heard of.

I wanted to escape from each of those trips the moment they began. They resembled a badly staged theatre play to me. However, if spectators can escape a bad play during its intermission — my opportunity to sneak out of the sight of Aleksei Alexandrovich was when our group entered the second room of the gallery. So I slipped away from the rear of our group.

I could hear Aleksei Alexandrovich’s voice shouting tedious historical dates even three rooms away in Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery. In the next thirty minutes, I was a thirteen-year-old teenager who could do whatever he wanted, albeit, still stuck in an art gallery.

My teacher had a special talent for making his students dislike what he taught. In our young minds, including mine, we associated the entire subject of painting with his tedious, repetitive, superficial teaching method. We knew, for example, the dates of birth of many Italian Renaissance artists by heart whose paintings we had not even seen. What was the point of us knowing when Da Vinci was born, if we didn’t see his works?

Many of my classmates disliked and stayed away from the world of art in their later lives precisely because of Aleksei Alexandrovich. I could have ended up disliking and rejecting art as well if I didn’t get lost while looking for the gallery’s café on that trip to Tretyakov Gallery.

‘It is when we get lost that we find what we were looking for’ — a wise man said. I can still remember the number of the room where I found the painting that pulled me away from Aleksei Alexandrovich’s influence — it was room number nineteen.

Black Sea by Ivan Aivazovsky | Wiki Commons

They say when the student is ready, the teacher will come. In my case, I wasn’t sure whether I was ready either mentally or spiritually, but the teacher did appear.

‘What do you see?’ — I heard a gentle but confident voice coming behind me. At first, I got scared that one of the gallery staff wanted to enquire why I was alone and away from my class.

“Don’t get distracted by me, but what do you see in this scene?” — the voice got closer and belonged to a woman who wore dark-framed glasses and a dark blue dress with the gallery badge hanging around her neck.

A bit confused by a stranger asking me a question I replied: “It is as if something is about to happen or maybe…”— I hesitated — “it has already happened. I am not certain”.

“Maybe, you’re onto something…”— she replied crossing her hands behind her back — Maybe what you’re looking for hides in the painting’s title. Aivazovsky called it The Storm at the Sea when he first painted it, and it was only later, for some unknown reason that the title was changed to The Black Sea”

“I think the storm has already happened and the sea is calming down. The storm had already taken its place, not the other way around.”— I paused, it was the first time I was discussing painting with someone and it was unusual to do it with a stranger — “If we look at the waves at the bottom right, we can see that the sea is calming after the storm. I saw something similar when I was at the Black Sea a couple of years ago.”

She tossed her badge — that hung from a lanyard — over her shoulder so that it didn’t hit the painting and she leaned closer to the painting. “Maybe you’re right”— she said.

At the time I did not realise that my observations must have been incredibly trivial to her. When I pointed out the small, barely visible ship that was sailing away in the far distance, she asked me:

“All of Aivazovsky’s paintings are sort of a struggle between bright and dark colours. He uses colour to convey ideas behind the scenes. You pointed out the small tiny ship sailing away on the horizon. What do you think its colour represents?”

Black Sea by Ivan Aivazovsky (detail) | Wiki Commons

I could sense that she was genuinely eager to hear my interpretation. The questions that I was asked by teachers at my school always had only one ‘right’ answer. In contrast to them, this lady was curious about what I thought and the reason behind it. She wanted to learn my perspective, not to impose hers on me.

“He depicts the journey of our lives. The ship, of course, represents individual life. The stormy waters and their waves represent the challenges and obstacles that we all sail through throughout our lives. The ship in this painting gets closer and closer to the sky, which I believe represents God…”

“How old are you? Around fifteen, I suppose?”

“Thirteen.”— I replied.

“Very deep and philosophical for a thirteen-year-old. However, your interpretation might be correct. It is one of the works that Aivazovsky created later in his life, and the sky might also represent Anna Burzanian, his second wife, whom he married soon after the completion of this painting.”— She paused and then asked: “May I ask where are you originally from?”

“I’m Armenian” — although I grew up in Moscow, it was quite clear from the way I looked that I was not Russian.

“And you know that the real name of Ivan Aivazovsky was Hovhannes Aivazian. He was born and lived in the Russian Empire, but both of his parents and his second wife were Armenian. That’s a fun fact that I am quite sure you will remember. I know that Armenians like facts like this”— she smiled.

It was at this moment I heard the voice of Aleksei Aleksandrovich getting closer to us. Only thirty minutes had passed from the moment I sneaked away from the trip and somehow Aleksei Aleksandrovich managed to pass nineteen rooms — with two dozen paintings in each — in just half an hour. I remember that I invented the way to measure this speed and called it ppM — or ‘paintings per minute’.

Photo by Andrey Grodz on Unsplash

Aleksei Aleksandrovich’s face was usually very pale. However, when he saw me talking about art to someone other than him — on a school trip — his face flushed bright red. His ego was wounded. He was angry to see his invisible authority in art being challenged.

“I hope he didn’t cause trouble” — he said addressing the lady I was talking to.

“No, not at all. He was actually telling me his vision of this painting — which I actually found quite interesting. Is this your class’ first trip to the Tretyakov Gallery?”

“Of course not. We bring our students here every year. Sorry, do you work here?”

She began to search for her badge and then quickly remembered that she had flung it over her shoulder whilst she was talking to me. She brought it back to her front.

Aleksei Alexandrovich leaned towards her badge to see what it said and his face turned back to being pale as he found out who she was.

“I am so sorry”— he said with agitation — “I know and admire your work. I have seen all your exhibitions and your writing. I hope he didn’t take much of your time”

She interrupted him and told me to wait. She left me standing next to him for two uncomfortable minutes and came back holding a book in her hand. Alexei Alexandrovich was about to say something, but she turned towards me and handed it to me.

“Here’s a gift from me. It’s the catalogue of Aivazovsky’s works that I authored for this museum. I am sure you will spend many hours browsing it.”

Of course, she was correct. I still keep it in a special spot in my library since then. However, on that day, I learned the difference between a good and a bad teacher. A bad teacher tells facts; a good teacher awakens.

A teacher who only recites facts is afraid to awaken the curiosity of their students, because once students learn how to teach themselves they no longer need a teacher. They can read and find the facts for themselves.

A teacher who awakens a passion for art (or for any other subject) in a student, does this with a completely different goal in mind. This type of teacher always looks for a potential student with whom they can truly share their passion with.

My unexpected teacher turned out to be one of the leading gallery curators in Russia. I was too young to know, but she curated exhibitions in the Tretyakov Gallery and Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, amongst others.

After the school trip finished I was hoping that Aleksei Aleksandrovich would not call my parents to report me sneaking out of his tedious school trip.

He usually did it when other students did something similar. But this time, was an exception. I can only guess that he didn’t want to remind himself that one of his students became independently minded and didn’t need him anymore.

Ten years after I graduated from school, I went to visit the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. When I stopped at the leaflet stands to check what exhibitions were on, I heard a familiar voice behind me.

It was the voice of Aleksei Alexandrovich, who addressed his class with a loud voice. He was telling them about the same exhibition he used to tell my class ten years ago.

I looked at the faces of the teenagers he was speaking, in the hope that one of them would also escape and meet their true teacher as I did on my trip.

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This article was originally published in February, 2021 on Medium.

I no longer write there, so thought I would share some of the pieces here.

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