In anything at all, perfection is finally attained NOT when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

No silence is as uncomfortable for a teacher as the space between question and answer. We imagine our discussion starters will lead to waving hands as students jump in, eager and prepared. When that doesn’t happen, most of us answer our own questions. Research says we wait less than a second when we’d get better answers if we waited between three and seven. Seven seconds? I wasn’t willing to risk it. Seven seconds in a high school classroom is an invitation to chaos. I asked and answered so many of my own questions I felt like an actor playing twins — first one personality, then another. Lindsey Lohan reprising the Hayley Mills role in “The Parent Trap” had nothing on me. The routine left me exhausted, students bored observers.

Written by Anne Ayers Koch. Find more of Anne's writing on Substack.

Edited and produced by Geoff Koch and Amanda Barranco

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I had two problems. First was the idea that an easy question with quick answers was learning. It’s not. It’s recall — something useful but different. The second was my aversion to empty space. After too many years of lessons that looked like game show preparation, through trial and error my questions improved. I stopped asking for short, recall responses in favor of those that required actual thinking.

A math teacher helped me with the space problem.

Part Five***EARTHSHINE

There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always the something you were after.

—J.R.R. Tolkien

Lost, yesterday, somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours each set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered, for they are gone forever.

—Horace Mann, 1796–1859

The door to the cramped office was locked. The appointment card read 3 p.m. The wall clock in the waiting area said 3:10. We knocked. With a jerk, it flew open. A man stepped out. Dressed in a black suit, white shirt, pale tie, he looked out of place amid the careless exuberance of a college campus.

“Come in,” he said with a reassuring, jovial smile. “Sorry about the locked door. Human resources rules, you know. Let’s start. You have an hour. Don’t want time to get away.”

He slid his business card across the table: “Retirement Planning.”

The computer behind him ticked off the minutes like a basketball scoreboard clock. He had questions. “What do you need?” “What is essential?” “How much time remains?” The first two were easy. The last unanswerable.

Sixty minutes later we made our way across campus in the gathering gloom to the car. Where had the time gone? Not the hour, the decades. I found myself thinking about Mrs. Merrifield’s lamp.

***

I was 22 years old. It was our first apartment. The previous tenant, a gentle white-haired woman, was moving to a retirement home. She left behind one table lamp in the center of the living room floor. Attached was a note in a spidery hand. “Consider this a gift.”

The lamp was like Mrs. Merrifield herself — the green and gold base worn and faded, the shade not quite level. But it worked. It was the first household item we owned. Years passed. More lamps appeared. Mrs. Merrifield’s gift, outclassed and obsolete, ended up in the trash.

According to the black suit, the things we accumulated might be difficult. A minefield to manage. To maintain. I didn’t think so. Material things aren’t the problem. Knowing when to let go is the problem. I learned that from painting. Time was another story.

***

I acquired a large collection of books and magazines on arts and crafts over the years. The china ones often begin with lists — “Materials Used for Painting on Porcelain.” What follows are 40 or so items before they get to kiln requirements. Catalogues offer as many as 60 different brushes. Hundreds of colors. Thousands of blank objects to paint.

China shows and exhibitions feature earnest sellers offering a dizzy array of items “painters can’t do without.” I ended up with potions, bottles, boxes, tools I couldn’t identify, much less use. Vendors extolled the virtues of one color “house” over another.

I bought vials from many. Soon I had 14 rose shades, 20 reds, 19 browns, even six grays. I couldn’t keep track. Lugging my supplies to class took several trips.

***

After painting for some years I stumbled on an instructional video on the internet by Barbara Duncan. Duncan, a world-famous oil as well as china painter, was demonstrating “peace roses.” What surprised me was her palette. Nine colors. She mixed everything from them. She used three brushes — a squirrel shader with a flat square top, a long thin scroller, and a small berry brush. “Of course, these take practice,” she said. “Don’t be discouraged. Keep on.” She was talking about roses. I was thinking about tools.

I reduced my painting supplies by half. It was easier to carry, to choose, to create, to clean up. I experimented. I improvised. I deviated from suggested design palettes.

***

Theodore Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, wrote his famous “The Cat in the Hat” with 236 words after reading a 1954 article in Life Magazine asking why children’s stories were so complicated. Afterwards, his publisher, Bennett Cerf, bet him $50 he couldn’t write a story with 50 words. Cerf lost. Geisel wrote “Green Eggs and Ham.” It remains one of the four best-selling children’s books in the world. Less became more.

Michael Masterson and Malcolm Gladwell are contemporary writers about achievement. Masterson says it takes at least 1,000 hours of practice to get past incompetence in anything. At 5,000 hours one becomes competent. He agrees with Gladwell’s assertion in “The Outliers” — mastery comes after 10,000 hours.

2010 marked 10 years of china painting. Ten years: to borrow from Pascal, nearly nothing in relation to infinity, nearly everything in relation to nothing. By Masterson and Gladwell’s reckoning I am a little more than halfway to competence as a china painter.

How much time do we have left? The man in the black suit, surrounded by actuarial tables and charts, couldn’t be sure. Nor could his locked door keep time from slipping away like pale winter sun on a cloudy afternoon.

Sort. Simplify. Substitute. Good advice for painting. For writing. For the material world. Time is different. There will never be enough.

Artists and writers don’t stop time. They do make it easier to see it. With fewer tools I concentrate on what I am painting, not what I am painting with. I waste less time rummaging for lost items. I’ve gained more — time to revisit favorite subjects. Reread favorite books. My paint box is lighter. My house is cleaner.

A man in black asked questions. A painter had some answers.

Reduce. Restrict. Refine.

A poet had the rest:

The painter Harlan Hubbard said / That he was painting Heaven when / The places he painted merely were / The Campbell or the Trimble County / Banks of the Ohio, or farms / And hills where he had worked or roamed: / A house’s gable or roofline / Rising from a fold in the hills / Trees bearing snow, two shanty boats / At dawn, immortal light upon / The flowing river in its bends.

And these were Heavenly because / He never saw them clear enough / To satisfy his love, his need / To see them all again, again.

—Wendell Berry, “Sabbath XV, 2005”

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The damp snapping wind ices the bones / through to marrow.

Puddles from silver rain earlier in the week / create a chain of lakes / along the moss-edged cement sidewalk — / a mottled white ribbon / stained with silhouettes of / dying leaves like dusty chalk outlines / at a murder scene.

Soon their shadows disappear as more / and more descend, burying the decayed / charcoal shapes beneath soggy piles, / as though remembering summer’s splendid / verdant canopy is too painful to recall.

The stern old trees rise from the / blotchy grass, shaking their black / limbs like fists against the cold / bitter blue sky.

Canadian geese peck at fallen brown / apples near the sleek granite building. / Winter is stalking the campus.

Autumn begins with the same three / colors: green landscape, yellow / leaves falling through a / gray afternoon.

—Notes from Ann Arbor, 2009

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The sky was as Prussian blue as Potsdam could require, but it was yet more like that lavish and glowing use of the color which a child extracts from a shilling paint box.

—G.K. Chesterton

It was a destination birthday party — an important birthday — a 50th birthday. Winding along the rural roads of Sonoma County on a sunny afternoon, we saw countryside dotted with shabby cottages, mom and pop businesses, roadside vegetable stands. Wide swaths of vineyards crisscrossed the landscape like giant checkerboard lines.

Down a bumpy dusty narrow lane a house emerged out of the hillside. A beautiful, elegant Craftsman, it should have been out of place amid its more modest neighbors, but it wasn’t. The wraparound deck, filled with revelers, looked across the valley to distant hills wearing rows of grape vines like exotic jewelry. Other guests wandered the grounds. This must be how Gatsby felt when he looked across the water, I thought. Fitzgerald’s world had its own surprises — so did the house before me.

Written by Anne Ayers Koch. Find more of Anne's writing on Substack.

Edited and produced by Geoff Koch and Amanda Barranco

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The host, the husband of the man whose birthday we were celebrating, took us on a tour. The colors were warm, subtle, muted. Both men had demanding jobs. I knew enough about color to know these had been chosen to create the restful, quieting influence browns and greens elicit. The sightlines and room dimensions were precise. Turning a corner, I found a spectacular large, exuberant many-colored canvas. Against the measured subdued backdrop it was even more captivating. An attractive woman, wearing the turban that said she was fighting cancer, stood nearby. “Do you like it?” she asked.

“It’s staggering. It looks alive.” I said.

“It is alive,” she smiled. “I should know. I painted it.”

Happy are the painters, for they shall not be lonely. Light and color, peace and hope, will keep them company to the end of the day.

— Winston Churchill

Between the end of my discouraging high school principalship and before the Chapman University appointment the following spring, I decided I needed one thing — anonymity. Something meaningful I could do alone. Alone was key. No groups, no committees, no project teams, no political wrangling. An art class might be the answer. I was wrong. Not wrong about the class. Wrong about what I needed.

Written by Anne Ayers Koch. Find more of Anne's writing on Substack.

Edited and produced by Geoff Koch and Amanda Barranco

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The china painting session began in January. Pulling into the crowded Community Center parking lot, I snagged the last slot, farthest from the building. The rain and angry gray slashing clouds turned noon into night. Soaking wet and grumpy, I ducked into the lobby. Opposite the glass entry doors, the Center’s fluorescent lights crisscrossed the art room ceiling like a giant tic-tac-toe game, piercing the gloom. Dripping my way across the floor, I hesitated in the doorway. The smell of paints, alcohol, oils, and turpentine swirled out, taunting. Should I go in? Go home?

A break in the clouds sent shafts of light streaming through the skylight above onto tables below stacked with brushes, rags, design books, and blank china plates. A tiny Chinese lady looked up from her seat. “Come in,” she said. “There’s a place right here.” Seven words. Simple. Short. Sincere. Stepping inside, I thought to myself, “If this doesn’t work out, it’s only eight weeks.”

“I’m new. I’m not sure what to do.”

“I’ll help you,” she said. “And the teacher will too. You’ll see.”

***

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When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

—R. Buckminster Fuller

Sometimes we don’t realize what we’ve learned until we’ve already known it for a very long time. Writer Ann Patchett says:

Coming back to something can help you see how all the dots in your life are connected, how one decision leads you to another, how one twist of fate, good or bad, brings you to a door that later takes you to another door, which, aided by several detours—long hallways and unforeseen stairwells—eventually puts you in the place you are now.

For me, one of those “somethings” was a tole project.

***

The most exhausting part of motherhood is the fact that for 99.9 percent of the various needs, you can’t simply decide to “opt out,” or even put them off until later; a child preparing to run into traffic takes precedence over anything else. It is the loss of the smallest measures of mental freedom and self-containment, the ability to pay attention to oneself when needed at that moment(!), that carries the most impact on our lives, energy, and sense of self.

At home, I painted in the hours before dawn, before daytime demands. As I worked, the room changed from black to gray as Oregon’s oft-hidden sun announced a new day beginning. On Thursdays, a widow neighbor watched the children. I took a paint-filled tackle box to the University library. Using Jim’s faculty status to reserve a small study room the size of a closet, I would set up my paints and lose myself in a landscape or still life. It was a routine very similar to my Whittier study carrel days. The difference was at Whittier I looked at the paintings tucked around me; in Oregon I painted them myself.

***

The National Society of Tole and Decorative Painters held an optional certification examination once a year. Submitted projects were evaluated on a long list of criteria, from brush control, to composition, to color choices, to wood preparation and finishing. I decided to apply. I spent months on my submission. The subject, chosen by the association, was a formal still life. A copper cylindrical vase with daffodils, daisies, and poppies cascading out stands on a shadowy table. To the left grapes, strawberries, and a ripe peach surround a small oval-decorated box. Muted yellows and reds filter through the background. I imagined it sat in a prosperous colonial dining room. It came to life in the bowels of the university library.

I wrapped the 11-by-17” piece as though it were glass instead of wood and sent it off to New York. Two hundred points was the qualifying score. I had been painting for some years and knew it was the best piece I had done. I was sure I would qualify. If there was anything I was good at, it was taking tests. When the critique arrived some weeks later, I tore the envelope open. “We regret to inform you…,” it began. As I scanned the evaluation grid, phrases floated by, “needs more contrast... deepen shadows...doesn’t shimmer.” My score: 188. Close. Not close enough.

***

I jammed the project in the back of the winter coat closet—too discouraged to look at it for weeks. Never mind all I had learned in the process—the happy hours I spent in classes and in the library carrel, the people I met. It is disappointing even now to remember how disappointed I was then. I wasn’t as resilient as life requires. Time taught other lessons that made this failure seem insignificant. But not then.

Dave Henderson was a Boston Red Sox backup player in 1986. He hit a home run that defeated the Angels in the seventh game and got the Sox to the World Series, where they lost to the New York Mets. Later Henderson said, “I actually won a World Series in 1989, but the one I think about most is ‘86. It hurts more to lose than it feels good to win.” Yes, it does.

***

I continued painting and began teaching a beginning evening class at a large local craft supply store. Joyce Steece, the wife of another professor, was my first student. An English teacher, she was like me, not teaching in Oregon, looking for ways to keep learning. We talked about breaking painting into manageable parts and how similar that was to teaching someone to compose an essay. Before I completed a second submission, we left the Northwest. The Steeces returned to USC and Joyce to a long career, as did I. I often began my lessons on expository writing by painting a simple apple for class. It helped my students. I wonder if she did the same.

Today the colonial still life hangs on the wall. It looks the same as it did three decades ago—but the young woman who painted it is gone. I occasionally study it through the lens of the present. Three things stand out:

* Although I met the technical requirements, the painting looks stiff. Still lifes aren’t still. My porcelain teacher says, “Make your work sing!” Though my project wasn’t porcelain, it wasn’t singing either. It was humming.

* The time I spent with other amateur painters was as important as the painting. After all, amateur descends from “amator,” which is Latin for lover. Throughout much of its history it has also been used to refer to people who engage in an activity for love rather than money. Having enjoyed community concert bands and local theaters that dot the landscape, I know how useful a role the serious amateur of all kinds plays in community life.

* Most important, just because things hadn’t gone the way I planned didn’t mean they had gone all wrong. I became a better teacher and a better painter than I would have otherwise been. And because I was so unaccustomed to failure in competitive settings, it was a step toward becoming a better human being… or at least a more compassionate one.

***

Living has taught me, since those days, that there is a balance between getting what you want and being open to the things that actually come your way. There are many more important challenges than painting certifications—but in its time and place it was important to me. Today I think certification would have been terrible. Life is not about getting certified. It is about remaining curious, staying open, trying not just one day…but every day. The real trick is to let life, with all its missteps and regrets, be always more alluring and mysterious than its end.

“It hurts more to lose than it feels good to win.” Yes, it does.

The 12 points I didn’t earn gave me a chance to rethink something I thought I knew. The quiet cylindrical vase became a touchstone. When family issues loomed large, or teaching became overwhelming, I would sometimes stand in front of the wooden picture and think.

From a painting perspective, my still life is quiet… barely “humming,” in fact. From a life perspective, I hear it singing. It’s a melody I recognize.

I wrote it myself.

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Outside, drought weakened / the brittle trees, fading them / to sickly grayish-brown.

Inside, one lone faux fir—imperial, / emerald green, impassive—loomed.

Written by Anne Ayers Koch. Find more of Anne's writing on Substack.

Edited and produced by Geoff Koch and Amanda Barranco

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It stood defiant, smug, pampered, / looking out the window at its / anemic cousins.

Stripping off its gaudy decorations, / I began tugging at its trunk.

It collapsed with a jerk like an / enormous umbrella.

The outside trees swayed in the wind, / nodding their approval.

###

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I am always doing things I can’t do. That’s how I got to do them.

—Picasso

December clocks have a different rhythm. Instead of a measured analog tick-tock-tick-tock, they move at the speed of my digital kitchen timer—numbers tumbling by in a blur. Every year, Christmas comes sooner. I love Christmas. I love “keeping” Christmas. Why was it becoming more difficult? I pushed the nagging question aside until one recent year when the invisible elephant materialized on Christmas Eve—unexpected, unwelcome, and unavoidable—impossible to ignore any longer.

Written by Anne Ayers Koch. Find more of Anne's writing on Substack.

Edited and produced by Geoff Koch and Amanda Barranco

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In painting the flow and line of the subject shape leads you through the piece. There are lots of rules about using an S curve or a C curve to design. They both give balance as well as make your eye follow a line through the subject rather than having a static non-flowing image. A single flower without stems or leaves in the middle of a plate would be lifeless—no movement. Your eye would lock in one place. Leaves, stems, and subordinate blooms along the curves create energy. Good designs lead your eye through the subject to the edge and back.

I began a January painting class while still packing Christmas away. The first session the teacher critiqued the complicated Dresden flower design I sketched. Her assessment: “No pathways. No connections to the center.”

“That’s it! That’s what’s wrong,” I thought to myself. “Not wrong with the plate. Wrong with Christmas.” Society lost the journey—the “before,” the waiting, the anticipating, the centering—and zoomed in on the day itself. So had I.

The color of truth is gray.

—André Gide

In 2012, the world (or parts of it anyway) was celebrating the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens. A wealthy woman who painted occasionally with us traveled to England to be part of festivities that included meeting the queen. An adventurous widow of extraordinary means, she had hosted the china painting class at her remarkable three-acre estate—filled with museum-quality work on every wall and available surface. “I’m a collector,” she said. Owner of several homes, by all accounts generous to her family, a patron of another painter I knew, trustee of a small college…I wondered if she understood the Dickens she was celebrating.

Written by Anne Ayers Koch. Find more of Anne's writing on Substack.

Edited and produced by Geoff Koch and Amanda Barranco

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As most schoolchildren used to know, between the 1770s and the 1840s, England was transformed from an essentially agricultural island into the most powerful industrial nation in the world. Machines appeared that revolutionized cotton manufacture—the steam engine, the water frame, the spinning jenny. Transportation networks—canals, roads, railroads—led to a migration from country to city overnight. What happened next—the rise of manufacturers and merchants to political and social power—resulted in the inevitable separation of heads of industry from hands that produced. But human welfare didn’t keep pace with material prosperity. No one wrote about it better than Charles Dickens.

When he first saw grimy, dirty Manchester in 1838 he vowed to “strike the hardest blow in (his) power” for victims of exploitation in cotton mills. He did so over and over, never more than in “Hard Times,” the shortest of his books, but the most direct. In fictional Coketown, a wealthy retired merchant, Thomas Gradgrind, opens a school based on his Utilitarian worldview. A world obsessed with facts. A world where one character says, “I beg your pardon for interrupting you, sir…but I am sure you know the whole social system is a question of self-interest. What you must always appeal to, is a person’s self-interest. It’s your only hold.”

In the book “Charles Dickens and the Great Theater of the World,” Simon Callow writes, “He knew what poverty was. He knew what it was to be rejected, to be cast aside, to live in squalor.” For Dickens, the narrow focus on profit maximization and self-interest created an aesthetic blindness that squeezed all poetry and kindness from life. Beginning with “Oliver Twist” and its descriptions of the terrible plight of children, he became the most popular writer in England.

My graduate seminar, “Social Foundations of Education” asked the question, “What do people value and want to see in their schools?” I began with Dickens’ “Hard Times.” The novel, with its convoluted Victorian plot, ends with only one character achieving happiness—Sissy Jupe—the person least suited for a world where facts and figures held sway over the more humble ideas of faith and charity. The graduate students were troubled. They wanted to be part of a world with a broader agenda than economic, but they were being swept away on a tidal wave of expectations and assessments that measured less and less with more and more accuracy.

Society told them what to measure, what to stress, what to value. It became all they saw. All they were allowed to see if they wanted to keep their jobs. They packed away their art supplies, music lessons, geography, history, philosophy, physical education, industrial arts. All we have left in public education is what society sees as the path to professional financial success.

...

The purest form is still the shape / That mist inhabits, and dissolves, / Trampled snow is the only Rose.

—Yves Bonnefoy

FRAGILE. FLOWERS. I could read the bold words on the tall brown and green box leaning against the front door as I got out of the car.

Misty-eyed, I maneuvered the long awkward shape to the kitchen. Behind the shipping label was a card which read, “To my daughter. Love, Old Dad.” Inside were flowers—roses and lilies from my faraway 90-year-old father, sent for Valentine’s Day. Among the many gifts he showered on the extended family, flowers were among his favorite. He sent them to all of us—for new babies, graduations, birthdays; for successes, for encouragement, for loss of beloved pets, for broken hearts.

Written by Anne Ayers Koch. Find more of Anne's writing on Substack.

Edited and produced by Geoff Koch and Amanda Barranco

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After my first china painting session ended, I registered again. Soon, I was signing up for the afternoon and night class. Wednesdays became synonymous with painting. I took a university academic appointment with the understanding that I wasn’t available any Wednesdays. The routine was a metronome balancing two forces—a conventional activity people understood and a peculiar activity people overlooked. I didn’t mind. In the first I was the teacher. In the second I was the learner. Learning made me a better teacher. It always does.

The painting instructor introduced new subjects every term. Landscapes, still lifes, birds and animals, vegetables, fruits and flowers of every variety—except one. Roses. No matter how often we asked she replied, “You’re not ready.” Eventually, we chose our own compositions. Around the classroom people hunched over everything from enormous bowls to umbrella stands to lamp bases to small tables to dishware. Everyone had a favorite subject: holiday designs, portraits, horses, hummingbirds, exotic animals, water lilies, leaf studies. Just no roses.