Nature, the feminine, the sublime, the mischievous, the ephemeral, and the real-world— six artists, six ways of seeing. Like so many teachers at Sidwell Friends who are experts in their fields, the visual arts teachers on campus are both educators and practitioners. That means when the school day ends or the summer yawns before them, there is more work to do.

To that end, empty-nester Catherine Dunn, the Upper School art teacher, turned her living room into studio space. “I don’t have to have a kitchen table!” she realized. Upper School ceramics instructor Caroline Battle loves the academic calendar. “It’s the best way for me to live my life,” she says, “and it makes me happier than any other job creatively.” Lower School art teacher Kristen Campbell appreciates that teaching “ties to life as an artist but allows me to support myself in an interesting way.” What’s more, each of the School’s visual arts teachers say the students inspire them. “You get so many ideas from the kids,” says Dunn. “Their energy is pretty amazing.”

For the visual arts departments at Sidwell Friends, teaching is a happy companion to their own artistic pursuits. But make no mistake, each instructor is an artist in his or her own right. They show in local and regional galleries; they earn fellowships and awards; they sell work online and to collectors; they publish in art journals. Some Sidwell Friends art teachers have, at one time, supported themselves solely by making art. Others have had professional engagements that made use of their art. Campbell formerly designed book jackets for publishing houses in New York. And Upper School photography teacher Lely Constantinople previously worked as a photojournalist here in DC. Middle School art teacher Aaron Brophy has traveled to Cyprus on a Fulbright grant and to China with a teacher-exchange program to lecture and create. All of these experiences then unfold in the class- room, where the teachers’ share techniques, study different artists’ styles, and above all impart a passion for art, design, shape, and imagery.

“The emphasis is on a love of art, not the final result,” says Middle School art teacher Eliza Bright. “It’s not about how art looks—that’s not important. It’s about how you respect yourself, the process, and the learning experience.” Bright says she sometimes draws a dot on the board and then asks the students, “Is this art?” It’s the kind of question everyone from ancient aesthetics philosophers to the U.S. Supreme Court has wrestled with. But for Bright’s students, the answer is at once simple and pro- found: What story does it tell? “What- ever visual comes from someone is a representation of that person,” Bright says. “That’s the beauty—not in how it looks, but what it means, the story it tells.” (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bright also teaches drama.)

Sidwell Friends’ visual arts teachers are unanimous on this concept of process over product. “What’s really complex about teaching art is that I am not trying to make them artists,” says Constantinople. “I am trying get them to observe the world.” Dunn echoes the sentiment. “The idea is to observe and see,” she says. “If you keep looking, you see more and more detail.” Her students’ first assignment is often to draw something from nature, like a leaf. There is the outside shape of the leaf and then there is the subtle interiority—the veining, the nodules on the stem, even the space behind the leaf or the shadow it creates. Accuracy is not the aim; observing the tiny details is. It is as if every art student must scan the world with microscope eyes, placing an intimate focus on any potential subject—even a dot.

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LELY CONSTANTINOPLE

Upper School Photography

"I want students to have a healthy skepticism and know how to read an image successfully."

 

That attention to detail has practical applications as well. "By default, a photograph is manipulated," Constantinople says. “It has never been a reality.” For one thing, a camera lens captures a fraction of what our eyes perceive, photos are often selected for impact rather than truth, and, of course, images are routinely altered. “I want students to have a healthy skepticism and know how to read an image successfully.” Photography, she says, is not just about craft but about building up a knowledge of what’s technologically possible and discerning the truth. “We spend a lot of time interrogating images,” Constantinople says. “Images are dangerous. We get under the hood of what’s happening in a picture.”

Maybe that’s why in her own work Constantinople is drawn to analog conventions. She likes to combine photography and printmaking. (Printmaking as fine art has a rich history at Sidwell Friends, expressed most famously through artist Percy Martin, who taught at the School for decades.) “Speed and immediacy,” are the beauty and the curse of photography, says Constantinople, who is currently focused on mixing photography and other media to create wholly unique pieces that cannot be mass produced. It’s that instinct that led her to apply for and receive a professional development grant from Sidwell Friends and the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities to study one of the planet’s oldest printmaking techniques: héliogravure, a French process that employs etching, copper plates, sunlight, and hand-mixed emulsions. For Constantinople, the process meant pulling off the trick of reverse engineering an image’s time line. She began with a digitally processed photograph and then manually deconstructed it to its most analog constituent pieces. The result is almost an oxymoron— contemporary subjects and settings that look lost in time, like super-crisp daguerreotypes.

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CAROLINE BATTLE

Upper School Ceramics

"When they figure out the fine motor skills to do what once seemed impossible, it's amazing."

 

 

"I commend my colleagues for being as invested as they are in preserving nondigital and analog crafts,” says ceramicist Caroline Battle, for whom maintaining old techniques is, well, baked in to her medium. “I love preserving a craft, a heritage craft,” she says. “I’m a 3D thinker, so I am drawn to texture, folding, and sculpture.” Though she used to work on more abstract pieces, lately Battle has been producing functional, utilitarian pottery—like mugs and planters—in rich earth colors offset with teals and golds that she then sells. Making objects to market wholesale means perfecting her approach so that she can recreate pieces over and over again.

Her tenacity is equaled only by that of her pupils at Sidwell Friends. “The students here are so impressive to me,” she says. “They are so engaged and dedicated—even when they were in the midst of being in high school in the toughest year because of COVID. They always want to learn something else.” She finds particular joy in watching students wrestle with the coordination it takes to throw clay and then seeing their joy upon finding success: “When they figure out the fine motor skills to do what once seemed impossible, it’s amazing.”

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CATHERINE DUNN

Upper School Arts

"My favorite is the conglomeration of all the students' energy and excitement when they see something really work."

 

 

Catherine Dunn agrees. "My favorite is the conglomeration of all of the students’ energy and excitement when they see something really work,” she says. Dunn puts a particular focus on nature in her classroom, starting with the native flora right on the campus grounds, like the black walnut tree behind Zartman House that drops its fruits across the lawn—a pale green, zesty, citrus-scented ball on the outside (she encourages everyone to smell them) with loamy, inky black vegetation on the inside. “There’s just something special about nature,” she says. “If you’re out in the morning and you see a fox, you feel like that’s important, that’s a special moment. Magical.” 

Dunn wants her own art and that of her students to access those moments of intense connection. She talks to students about the caves of Lascaux in France, where paleolithic cave paintings of horses and bison depict that same primal relationship in a time capsule extending across tens of thousands of years.

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AARON BROPHY

Middle School Art 

"Studying the arts in a Quaker setting instills a sense of mindfulness in the students."

 

 

Time itself plays a seminal role in Aaron Brophy's work. His sculptures “address the ephemeral nature of corporeal existence.” His pieces rise with vitality yet seem to be disintegrating the longer you look at them. A lifelong Quaker, Brophy’s interest in existence is not merely corporeal. “Bringing aesthetic awareness to our sense of self enables us to be more fully present while creating, while performing, and while tending to our inner Light,” he says. “We honor the Light of creativity within each individual.” That’s why Brophy employs an art curriculum based on the literal (and metaphorical) study of light, including through renowned contemporary artists like James Turrell and Olafur Eliasson.

In addition to teaching art, Brophy is also the director of art exhibitions at Sidwell Friends, maintaining the School’s permanent art collection, which features Sam Gilliam, Gene Davis, Lou Stovall, and Nam June Paik among others. He’s also a big fan of the space in which these artists are displayed and where the students themselves exhibit work. “The light-filled art studios surround the wetlands garden and pond, reminding us every day of nature’s vital role in our creative lives,” he says. “The Middle School is an idyllic setting for students to cultivate aesthetic sensibilities and to thrive within a community of Friends. Studying the arts in a Quaker setting instills a sense of mindfulness in the students.”

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KRISTEN CAMPBELL

Lower School Art

"I want to engage the viewer and make a space for them to participate in the energy I am trying to create."

 

 

That mindful ethos dovetails nicely with Campbell's paintings, which strive for nothing short of the divine. “I want to engage the viewer and make a space for them to participate in the energy I am trying to create,” she says. “I want them to feel enlightenment, to reach a higher level.” Her focus on the experience of art is perhaps what makes her such a gifted Lower School teacher.

There's a wonderful line in the play Six Degrees of Separation about how in the 2nd grade all children are artistic geniuses—“Matisses, every one!” It’s exactly the feeling that comes to mind in the Lower School art room, where Campbell is surrounded by a riot of primary colors, yarns, construction paper, paste, and paint. “My personality is such that I am drawn to children,” Campbell says. “I love the innocence of children and their energy. I love watching them find joy in the process.”

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ELIZA BRIGHT

Middle School Art

"I try to make sense of my subconscious and inner self. I don't erase any mistakes."

 

When it comes to process, Middle School Art Department Chair Eliza Bright has a pretty wild one. She approaches her canvas blind—eyes sealed closed— and allows her spirit, her mood, and the moment to carry her. For 10 minutes, she scribbles furiously across a huge white sheet of paper taped to the wall before her, almost like a child feeling the nascent joy and freedom of squiggling and scrabbling here and there, up and down. Then Bright, steps back, opens her eyes, and takes in the chaos until an image appears—like staring at the sky until you discover pictures in the clouds. From there, it is a matter of bringing those images to the fore.

"I start giving it life," she says. "I try to make sense of my subconscious and inner self. I don’t erase any mistakes.” Every line created in that 10-minute fury remains. “Artists are messengers for courage to the world,” she explains. “Every line is meaningful and useful. I am not dismissive of the lines, because I do not dismiss the self. Knowledge of self is freedom.”

The native Macedonian is particularly interested in powerful female subjects. “I was brought up where I would cook for my brothers and father,” she says. “Women’s emancipation is better than in the past and that is exciting to me.”