IN HONOR OF MENTORING:
Mentoring calls upon a different set of skills and abilities than are used in either traditional classroom teaching or in the often-solitary creation of one's own art. In teaching, the commitment is to package up and deliver a set of information and skills; in mentoring, while the transfer of information and skills is still involved, there is a greater context for it and a more holistic approach. Mentoring requires two-way respect and a willingness on both sides to take some risks. It involves helping the student find his or her own voice, even if it does mean trying out the teacher's voice along the way, and it requires a student's willingness to share their struggles: meaning their failures as well as their successes. I think that mentoring in the arts may require a somewhat special sort of creativity, as well as a different frame of mind about sharing, but in many cases both the mentor and the student can gain much from the process. I've put together an exhibit with the intention of honoring both the processes of mentoring, and two individuals who have been very generous in mentoring numerous other photographers (myself included in that lucky number). Both artists work a lot (though not exclusively) with handcoloring black and white photographs. They've also co-authored a wonderful book Art & Fear, and teach a number of workshops each year throughout the country.
Saelon RenkesI also invited Ted and David to contribute their own thoughts on mentoring; this is what David wrote:
Most of what we know about art we learn from others -- and by others I mean all others not just other artists. Things that we really truly learn by ourselves, while they are precious, are relatively rare. For myself I learned from those who preceded me down the road mostly through participating in large number of workshops in which I was either a student or an assistant or a junior co-instructor in the presence of some really good and some really established artists.So I had lots of relationships with established artists, and those relationships came in every possible flavor, from instantaneous dislike to professional courtesy to genuine if sometimes fleeting friendship. I don’t know which, if any of these relationships was that of a “mentor”. All of them were perhaps. Perhaps none. I am also not sure that all of us as developing artists can have mentors -- some of us are just too headstrong to benefit much from the wisdom that is all around us, whether that wisdom is just in the air or served up deliberately. What’s more, I am not sure that “mentoring” is just one kind of relationship. More likely what think of or want from mentors is an artistic relationship that has a important current of personal concern running through it. The mentor may be the established artist that cares about the “person” in the developing artist. Perhaps that still doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. Perhaps, like most things human, the best tack is to savor things as they come along, and not worry much about naming them.
In any case, I had (and have) many guides and very many fellow travelers, but I never had what I would call a mentor. The closest thing to a mentor for me was Brett Weston, with whom I went on field trips over a few years, when I was a lot younger artistically than I thought at the time.
I realized eventually that almost everything I learned from him esthetically was probably an obstacle to my own work. Unlearning all that influence eventually became the important thing. This is all in hindsight, of course. At the time it didn't feel like influence, it felt like shared vision, or common concern, or something else entirely mutual.
However, his unintentional mentoring proved quite useful -- essential, critical, precious -- in one regard: the time I spent with Brett, I now know, was the time I was observed the strength of will it takes to keep your work at the center of your life (even if, like Brett, your work is unconnected TO your life). The stuff I learned from him about art was wrong, but the stuff I learned about being an artist was right on target.
As far as I could tell Brett's work was his life, for better or for worse. His greeting to me, always, without exception, was: "Hi Dave, how's your work?" as though the first thing, the most important thing, possibly the only thing one artist would want to know about another artist was how the work was going.
And by the way, no one who knows me calls me Dave.
That was heady stuff for me. I was about 20 years old, and a well established artist was taking me seriously as an artist. That's very seductive, and is probably the reason the influence became so inappropriately large. So large that moving out from around the influence, while holding on to the importance of working took at least a decade. Seduction is heady for both parties of course, which may be why artists sometimes become mentors, even unintentional ones.
-David Bayles
