ARTS Brentwood Artist and Teacher Patricia tells the story of how she has been sharing her passion for art with generations of school children. Now she shares the passion with us. July 2007

Patricia Padama

Art is in my blood, perhaps, since I am an artist and the daughter of an artist. My aunt was a potter; my grandmother both an artist and a teacher, so in my art and in my teaching of art I’m following in their steps.

Whatever its sources are, my art is born of passion and I’m driven to draw representations of the world around me. I work in many artistic media but prefer chalk painting.

My pictures include a lot of local scenery and I love to do on-location (plein air) art. It is much more effective to paint a scene as you see it than to paint the thing from a photograph because the human eye can see many more details — especially shades of color — than can be caught by any camera.

My personal world is full of color to a remarkable extent. My eye catches more colors than most people can see. Where some people see a red surface, I can see layers of oranges and browns swooshing through it. The world comes to me so varied in hue and with such layers of color that I thought something was wrong with my eyes. I actually asked an ophthalmologist what was wrong with me.

My pictures begin with an effort to capture what’s out there. But then I add a quality of sparkle or poetry to the literal image. Words are inadequate to describe the process. After drawing the bones I go back and dance on the canvas.

I often feel that I’m documenting our East County area and creating images of these places as we now see them so that years from now people might be able to look at one of my pictures and understand what the world of our time was like.

Perhaps I really am creating art for the ages. Any picture I create will not, itself, endure for centuries, of course, but now talented people are doing giclÈe renditions of my work. GiclÈe is the process of making a fine art print from a digital source using ink-jet printing. The result is a far more faithful reproduction of the original than was possible before the current age of digital technology, which, as far as giclÈe is concerned, began about a decade ago.

The conversion of any piece of my art into digital-based medium offers the possibility that the piece will endure because the reproduction is based upon an electronic file stored on a computer or server somewhere.

Colors fade and physical materials decay but, unless deleted, the bits and bytes comprising that picture file will remain unchanged. If the file makes it onto the Internet, the piece of art could ultimately be stored in multiple archives and will endure until the end of our technological society.

Teaching Children Art

For the past two decades I’ve been an art teacher in the Brentwood School System. In my opinion, art teaching is best left to artists. Mary Jane Barnes, a poet who used to teach in the district, once told me “If you aren’t practicing your craft, you aren’t really an artist.” So doing my own art gives me basis for authentically teaching art to others.

My classes include kindergarten through the fifth grade. Occasionally I’ll teach Adult Ed classes. My art classes are gleeful experiences. In my first class I tell the kids, “I’m Mrs. Padama and I’m here to get you dirty.” Sometimes I’ll begin by showing students how to get dirty by drawing a line with a pencil and then smudging it with their fingertips.

Something about the creative process invites disorder. I’ve learned that adult art students spill stuff all over themselves in the same proportion as kindergartners. I love to see the messes!

Younger children learn by imitation. You can’t just tell them, you do it for them; you show it to them. I prepare examples for every class. Each of my visual aids requires at least 15 hours preparation time.

I tailor projects to suit individual classes and situations. Following a public shooting, for example, some children became anxious about the approaching Halloween. We needed to have a happy Halloween theme so I created as an example an enchanted scene that included a tree, a woman in the moon, and a kitty.

Art can often surprise the artist. I don’t know why I put a lady in the moon, but I know that she belonged there. I saw two young boys looking intently at the tree. “You know there’s a tree fort in that tree,” one of them said. It was just great! After I displayed the scene in a show at an Antioch gallery, I had to wipe kisses off the picture of the kitty that had been planted there by little girls.

After completing a project I give children time to do something absolutely creative to make their pieces different; to put their own spin on their creations. I want them to learn that everyone has good ideas. My standard of success for children’s art is that at the end of the day students feel good about whatever they did.

My classes have always gone against a trend for young children that limits art to cutting things out and coloring things in. I wanted children to draw their own coloring books. When I start a lesson I give kids paper and have them begin making geometric shapes. You can make millions of things beginning with a circle. Combine that with some squares, ovals, and other circles to “build” a rhinoceros, or a president, or a mountain…. Some children are thrilled by this!

I try to trick children into drawing. A young boy might not like to learn to draw circles, for example, but he might gleefully draw a round gumball machine full of gumballs. He might not be too interested in drawing a cat, but he’ll have a great time drawing a cat getting fish bones from a garbage can. He’ll have great fun drawing spiky hair on a monster. This year I taught the classes to draw a balloon that’s popped. That was enormous fun.

My goal very often is to take the ordinary and make it run. Taping three papers on a table creates a sculpture. Drawing on a paper with a piece of charcoal paints a picture.

It’s no secret that public school art classes operate on a shoestring. My curriculum includes a unit on charcoal drawing. Since there is insufficient money in the budget to purchase charcoal I make the stuff myself out of branches cut from the willow tree in front of my house and out of pieces from the grapevines in my back yard. I actually planted the willow as a source of sticks for my charcoal.

My grandmother taught me how to do this. You must cut the wood into short sticks, which you then dry for a year. Wrap the sticks in tinfoil, put them into an aluminum can with pinholes punched in the sides, and cook them for a whole day on the barbeque. You put in sticks and take out charcoal. Chemistry in action! It’s magic!

Second to fifth grade art classes follow the same type curriculum that I would write for a college course. We cover the fundamentals of space, shading, composition, color theory, and perspective. Some theorists believe you can’t teach perspective to children, but I’ve been successfully teaching it for two decades.

Origins of my Teaching

I was born and raised in Sacramento, and moved to Brentwood in 1982. My husband, Randy, is an Electrical/Mechanical Designer/Draftsman for Lawrence Livermore Labs. He likes puzzles and mazes so that job just suits him.

I kind of backed into my life as an art teacher. When the second oldest of my four daughters was in the fifth grade at Garin School, her teacher was a remarkable woman named Didi Del Chiaro. Didi was a force to be reckoned with.

My daughter had me come for Career Day and speak to her class about cartooning. Didi invited me to come back and give art lessons to the children. They were enchanted! For the rest of the year I continued to return periodically for further art lessons.

The staff at Garin knew that at the end of the year my daughter would move on to middle school and my volunteer teaching would end. Ike Montenez, who was principal at the time, called me into the office and offered me a paid position. Bill Bristow, the Superintendent, said that the children should be able to decompress; to have fun.

“Teach fun art lessons,” he told me.

Well, sure!

As the district expanded, the length of time I could spend in each class shrank. For the first couple years I taught an hour a week per child at the Garin School. The staff at Brentwood Elementary learned about it and I was shared one semester at each school. Last year I had a trimester at Garin, Brentwood, Paul Krey, and Ron Nunn. Anne Williamson taught at Loma Vista and Pioneer. The two of us shared Garin and Brentwood schools and rotated among the others. Samantha Canto began teaching art at Paul Krey and Marsh Creek schools.

I’m getting into various kinds of art projects, including creating illustrations for a book by Jacki Irwin called Lewis, the Little Brown Hamster. It took a while to come up with a hamster that looks different than other cartoon rodents, but now Lewis looks unlike all the other hamsters in the world.

Over the course of a couple decades I attempted to complete a college education but the demands of children and family finally frustrated all my efforts.

Teaching art to children is a marvelous activity. I always call the children “littles,” as in “Hello, Little.” That’s the word my grandpa always called me.

I teach art history — from cave art to modern. In one unit I was presenting representational and abstract art to a class of kindergarteners when one of them suddenly blurted out, “Finally! Some art I understand!” The kid was born with some kind of abstract art gene.

Even as children some of us know what we want to be but often get side-tracked as adults. I’m not side-tracked, however. I’m doing what I’m supposed to do. I’m touching the lives of children. Some of them will not forget lessons about art that they learned in my class.

A few will become artists and will influence future generations by their art. Perhaps I’m starting some wonderful processes! The effects of my teaching might continue reverberating through the decades and even centuries that lie ahead of us.

And there’s always the giclÈe and those digital files. Centuries from now perhaps someone living in that unimaginable future will look at one of my pictures and understand something of what our East County was like in these days, which by then will be gone beyond the recall of memory.

That would be great!

To see examples of Patricia’s work, go to Frames-n-Things at 1145 Second Street, Suite B, Brentwood.