Thinking of Marvin Israel

Rummaging around in the studio I came across a catalogue from a retrospective exhibit of some work by Marvin Israel. Mr Israel was one of my favorite teachers in art school; I used to talk about him all the time. In class he seemed to enjoy teasing me, and it was just fine that we all had a good laugh about me and my work. My classmates and I would work on assignments at home and hang them in class for Mr Israel’s critique. I remember one assignment was to paint something that we love. I painted a green pepper. Someone painted a portrait of their teddy bear and it was the best one!

At this time some company started to manufacture colored tissue paper. There were many crafty ways to use this stuff with elmers glue and it was intriguing! I put my tissue paper painting up for critique and Mr Israel just shook his head and said “this is for blowing your nose.” That was the end of my tissue fascination for about 30 years until I began drawing on it. However, the most influential comment that he made about one of my pieces was,” This looks like you painted it with your elbows.”

I dropped out of school for a while. I attended another school. I went traveling with my friend Richard. I worked on coloring in the lines. My mantra was “neatness counts”. Then I returned to school, but Mr Israel was no longer teaching there. I continued with “neatness counts”…

Just now while looking at the catalogue of my teacher’s work it was quite apparent that he became a lot messier as time went on. He believed that there were two kinds of people – clean people and dirty people. He preferred dirty people. However, after reading about him in Wikipedia I do not think that I really understood what he meant.