ESSAY

When, in 1970, Harold Gregor began his twenty-five years of teaching at Illinois State University, a career leading to his being named a Distinguished Professor of Art, he entered both a university and a department experiencing rapid change.  Campus enrollment was increasing, and those numbers were especially noteworthy in the College of Fine Arts, where the student population nearly doubled from 1970 to 1976.  While the department had long enjoyed success in training art teachers, Fred Mills, a painter and chair of the art department, saw the need for diversification.  He envisioned a sophisticated studio program that would bring greater attention to the training of professional artists.  Under his leadership, both B.F.A. and M.F.A. programs were added, and the department received accreditation through the National Association of Schools of Art and Design.  Harold’s Ph.D. in painting from The Ohio State University, the record he had already established in exhibiting his work, and his past role as department head at Chapman College in California positioned him to provide essential insight and guidance, as well as to bring prestige to the department.

 

Harold Boyd had joined the art faculty to teach drawing in 1965, just as enrollments were beginning to push upward.  Painter Ken Holder came to the campus in 1969.  A friendship formed between the three, the “Two Harolds and Ken,” that extended beyond campus connections.  Their bond was so strong that the families of each became well known to each other, often celebrating holidays and special events together.  Printmaker Ray George began teaching at I.S.U in 1970.  Rodney Carswell and Ron Jackson joined the painting faculty in 1972, followed by painter/lithographer Jim Butler and printmaker Richard Finch arriving in 1976.  These artists remained central to the rapid development and presentation of advanced courses in drawing, painting, and printmaking throughout the 1970s.  The enlargement of the art department at that time also included the addition of Joel Philip Myers, who left his position as the director of design at the much-celebrated Blenko Glass Company to establish what would become an extremely highly regarded glass program.

 

A major leap forward for the art department came with the completion of the Center for the Visual Arts in 1973, one of eleven buildings completed on the expanding campus between 1967 and 1976.  Designed with considerable input from Mills and the faculty, the instructional spaces were both larger and more functional than previously used rooms.  One of the hallmarks of the new building was its impressive gallery.  From its earliest years, works of both national and international significance were exhibited, benefiting students, faculty, and the community.  In 1977, Richard Finch assumed the directorship of the Normal Editions Workshop and supported a program in which highly respected printmakers would come to campus to make art and to interact with students and faculty.  The N.E.W. program later was augmented by a separate visiting artists program that brought prominent artists working in any variety of media to campus for both short and long-term stays.  

 

Harold, Harold Boyd, Ken Holder, and Ron Jackson all kept studio space in downtown buildings.  Their workspaces were large, relatively inexpensive, and likely would have been the envy of nearly any New York artist of the time.  Interviewed multiple times about why he (and others) would stay in Bloomington-Normal while otherwise exhibiting in New York and beyond, Harold would cite the convenient driving time to Chicago and St. Louis, the ability to easily take a flight to major cities, and connecting airports, and the cultural opportunities afforded by living in a community with two universities.  The unhurried lifestyle inherent in living in Bloomington-Normal allowed time to balance his studio time with teaching and departmental responsibilities.

 

For the largest part of his teaching career, Harold primarily taught upper-level undergraduate and graduate students.  These individuals, though by no means green, were still developing as artists. They had questions about the direction of their work and often sought guidance on both technical and conceptual issues.  Harold encouraged them to push themselves harder.  He could be intimidating and during critiques saw no need to sugar-coat his remarks.  But he also could coax and gently prod, and he was always generous with his time.  Harold understood that teaching, at its core, is a nurturing profession.   

 

With his close colleagues, Harold formed a largely unspoken but generally understood agreement concerning teaching objectives.  Students needed to leave the department able to continually grow as artists.  For this to happen, they would need to develop a self-awareness that would allow them to effectively critique their own work and to understand their own place within contemporary art developments.  The most committed students would be making art the primary focus of their lives, and they needed to be introduced to the practical means, as well as the intellectual discourse, that would allow them to persevere and thrive.  Harold introduced students to gallery owners and managers and helped them gain representation.  He wrote letters of reference for his former pupils and gladly served as a mentor for those beginning their own professional teaching careers. 

 

A continued study of art history held tremendous importance for Harold.  He frequently traveled to see art, he attended lectures, and he read books and journals voraciously.  His was a frequent voice around the departmental photocopy machine where art exhibitions and reviews were discussed, sometimes at length.  From time to time, he taught art history courses and seminars where his enthusiasm and encyclopedic knowledge were on full display.  His personal interests were rooted most deeply in modern and contemporary concerns, and he no doubt delighted in discussing with his classes how artists such as Paul Cézanne used color in ways that could hold significance for their own work.  The writings of Barbara Novak on nineteenth-century landscape painting held special importance for him, and her discussions of the sublime and the beautiful in paintings of the American wilderness had a strong bearing on his teaching and his own painting, especially with regard to the embodiment of meaning in landscapes real and imagined. 

 

Harold understood the special significance of training artists within a university setting.  Teaching painting went far beyond technical instruction.  From at least the time of his doctoral work, when he studied the writings of John Dewey and André Malraux, Harold was convinced of the importance of the visual arts in shaping and recording cultural history.  By being well informed, artists should be comfortable in making sophisticated and responsible responses to their current political and social conditions.  Again, it was something of an unspoken agreement that students were not to become imitators of the faculty, but mature and independent thinkers.  One of several opinion pieces concerning the value of studio arts training that Harold saved (and is now preserved in his archives) is a Los Angeles Times article addressing the thoughts of four Otis Institute M.F.A. students concerning the meaning of their degrees.  It is tempting to think he saved the clipping because, while it addresses the inability of the degree to guarantee a job, one of the commentators asserted the importance of education in continually supporting a deeper self-understanding.  

 

By all appearances, Harold enjoyed what might be described as the business of art.  He spoke with his students about creating a group of tightly related works that could be more fully expressive than a single work, but also how this body of work might be of special interest to specific galleries.  He advised his students on the importance of matters such as keeping accurate permanent records of their works.  Without a doubt, when Harold was in his studio, he preferred to be painting, but he did not consider the necessary paperwork of a professional artist to be an onerous or avoidable chore.  He let his students know that they should not either.  He was something of a “life coach” for colleagues, too, recommending competitions and exhibition opportunities, commission possibilities, and serving as a reference for those seeking grants.

 

Harold was more than willing to lead by example, adhering to the prescription that faculty should devote efforts to their teaching, to research, and to public service.  Everything points to how seriously he took his teaching, even late in his career revising syllabi to keep the content vital for both himself and his students.  The research component of his work involved preparation for lectures, but it also included his extremely active life as a painter.  Among many other things, his painting career allowed him to speak frankly with students about his own changing interests, his experiments, and finding that success was not to be taken for granted.  As for the public service component, Harold through the years offered talks and lectures at galleries and schools throughout the country, served as a juror for shows of regional and national importance, and he published on the subject of watercolor painting.  He conducted painting workshops at venues including the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts.  

 

In an often-thumbed copy of one of Irving Sandler’s books on mid-century painting, Harold underlined several phrases about artists active in the Works Progress Administration.  He seemed especially interested in Sandler’s observations on the closely-knit sense of community the W.P.A. fostered among artists, perhaps, especially for those living and working in New York City.  It does not seem too far a reach to imagine that Harold saw in the W.P.A. opportunities to build a comparable community of working artists at I.S.U.  He supported collegiality in ways large and small and encouraged a culture of mutual respect.  He recognized that as much as the faculty instructed students, they also took inspiration from them.  The pathway forward for all was to provide mutual support in the refinement of skills and knowledge, to encourage self-expression, and to contribute in meaningful ways to the world beyond the campus.   

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Special thanks to Julie Neville of the Dr. JoAnn Rayfield Archives at Illinois State University, as well as artists Ron Jackson and Don Lake for their kind assistance in the preparation of this essay.