Persistence pays off for art teacher

Persistence is not a word normally associated with artists. Words like spontaneous or free-spirited come to mind more readily. But Seaford High School art teacher Michael Kerr not only claims to be persistent: He has it in writing.

After three years of waiting and cajoling, Kerr had his article “Facing the Fear” published in the October issue of SchoolArts magazine.

Each issue features articles on a particular theme; for the October edition, the theme was persistence. And for Kerr, the theme was entirely appropriate, because he had waited more than three years to see his article in print.

“I’d been looking at the magazine since art school,” the 13-year veteran of Seaford’s art department said. “And when I started teaching at Seaford, the former department chairman would always leave it lying around.” Kerr began thinking it might be interesting for both himself and his students if he submitted an article.

As he started casting around for ideas, he hit on one of the units in his Comic and Cartoon class: Facing Your Fears.

“I overheard a couple of girls discussing their appearance one day,” Kerr said. “They were really tearing themselves apart. ‘My eyes are too big, my hair is a disaster . . .’ Their bodies are changing and they’re interested in relationships, but they have all these insecurities.” Kerr decided to combine the techniques of cartooning in a way that was part art teacher and part psychologist.

“I started with a photo of myself,” he said. “I projected my image on the screen and began asking students to tell me what they saw — the flaws. They’d tell me my eyebrows were too bushy or my ears were too big.” As each student weighed in, Kerr manipulated the image with PhotoShop so that in the end, he had a caricature of himself.

“I used self-deprecating humor, and I hoped that if I could be that brutally honest with myself, it’d give them permission for themselves,” he said.

Students had already examined the work of some of the great political cartoonists, such as Herbert Block, better known as Herblock, so the idea of caricature was familiar. But they had never thought of applying it to themselves, and not all of them embraced the idea. “I had a few who would ask if they could do a celebrity instead,” he said.”Some of them were really uncomfortable with the idea of staring at their own faces.”

As work progressed, though, most students caught the spirit of the project and began to have fun. “They’d say, ‘Oh no, your mouth is way bigger than that!’ And the PhotoShop tool made it easy to really exaggerate their features.”

Kerr originally submitted his article on the project to the Ziff Davis publication more than three years ago. “All the students whose works I submitted have already graduated,” he said. “They sent me the contracts, which I signed, and said they’d let me know when it was going to run. I was supposed to get $100 when the article ran, which they cut down to $75.” As months became years, “I started to get a little nasty,” he said, laughing.

Finally, his $75 check arrived. “I didn’t know if they were going to run [the story] or were just trying to shut me up,” he said. But at the beginning of the summer, he heard that the story would finally run.

Kerr is not only an accomplished artist, but also plays guitar and sings in a rock band, so performing was nothing new. But being a published writer was a different experience. “Seeing the article was like a validation of what we were trying to do,” he said. “And I thought it was really appropriate that it appeared in an issue titled ‘persistence.’”

Kerr said he was happy with the result, although he would have preferred a different illustration. At first, he was low-key about his achievement. “I didn’t want to boast. I wanted the focus to be on the art.” But he did admit to having a small stockpile of the magazines.

“Sometimes cartooning is like the black sheep” of the art world, he said, even though many famous artists made their marks in the genre. “We studied Roy Liechtenstein and the pop artists,” he said.

When it comes to students facing their fears, the unit seemed to have worked, at least for some. “It improved the way I looked at myself,” said junior art student Jess Savio, who said she accepted herself better because of the class. “You take the things you don’t like about your appearance and you learn to really look.”