On almost any school day – during his lunch time or in the hours before and after school – you might catch Doug Depice bent over a sketchpad in the art room at the high school. Sometimes, he is peering carefully at a photograph he had taken previously, sometimes he is recalling an image he had collected earlier in the day. But in most cases, the images he is struggling to put down on paper are those of the students he has in various classes.
Depice, who has been teaching art in the Secaucus school district for about 28 years, has been inspired by his students, a slight reversal of roles since – as a teacher – it is Depice who is supposed to inspire his students.
Depice has soul of a poet, and often speaks in metaphoric language: “As an artist/teacher, I’ve come to see teaching and learning as one with truth and love,” he wrote in an essay that he hopes will accompany a collection of artwork based on images he had collected from kids in his classes. “Teaching is a way of drawing out the quality of the thinking mind, the feeling heart and the imagining soul.”
Depice said recently that he was not surprised by how much his students have inspired him, calling learning “a process of giving and receiving” that “enlightens, empowers, re-patterns and transforms” both teacher and student.
The collection of artwork he is looking to publish comes from observations of his students before, during and after class. He attempts to capture them in various moments in their lives, such as when they are self-reflecting, showing emotion, socializing, or even observing the world around them.
“These drawings are my studies of human beings in a learning environment,” he said. “In this kind of environment students learn, grow, question, dream, wonder, connect, transform and laugh.”
Depice said he has tried to capture a student’s bodily gestures, the subtle expression of the thinking mind, the “feeling, hearing and the imagining soul.”
“For me these human gestures portray interior moments that cause interesting figural expressions,” he said.
Depice said he started the drawing in 1998, when he began to notice that his students seemed to reflect many of the powerful images he was teaching them to look for in works of art.
“I wanted to put down on paper some of that inner sense of being I saw in them,” Depice said.
Sometimes it was the way they sat or stared into space, sometimes it was the intensity of their study, sometimes it was a beam of light or a cast of shadow.
Once he started noticing, he couldn’t stop. As he started to put these images down on paper – often staying after school and working from memory, or dashing out a sketch while his students did their work, he began to notice, too, a change of style. Different kids required a different historical style in order to bring out the depth of their thinking or feeling.
The kids came from various classes. Sometimes, he drew the work as an example for the other student in a drawing class and realized he had managed to capture something important in his example. Sometimes, he would agonize over the work later on his own time to capture the feeling and the sense of space he had caught briefly while watching the student in the classroom.
The artworks ranged throughout the spectrum of art, and indeed, each student and situation seemed to call out for a particular style, as if no other would do in expressing the emotion or the state of being.
“It just came out that way,” he said. “It seemed as if the subject required a certain style and I sensed it as I worked.”
During his days teaching, he sees something in his students that he later tries to catch in artistic painting.
“There are so many moments in a teacher’s day when one can see the beauty of a student’s humanity glowing or witness the sense of personal empowerment that accompanies the glory of poising dreams and hopes,” he said. “These drawings are based on my observations of learning and the growth of the human spirit. Just as Degas drew and painted ballerinas training, and socializing and reflecting in the dance hall, I’m studying my students in the classroom.”
Four categories
The drawings are divided into four categories: his objective observations of students as individuals, the students socializing, the students engaged in the creative process, and his students caught in the moment of personal reflection. The artworks revealed inner personalities that even surprised Depice at times, showing kids in expression that seemed more intense or mature than he would have gauged from class. To capture a certain sense of their personality, Depice sometimes drew them in groups to show socializing, and as individuals to show some particular aspect of that person’s inner self.
“I draw what I see,” he said, often needing to alter mediums from charcoal or pencil to watercolor or ink. The styles seem to develop out of the subject. Often, he doesn’t realize how close a scene fits in with a biblical or classical theme until he is finished.
“In these drawings I tried to capture those moments of their honest humanity and glory,” he said.