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Art, caregiving, Christopher Cudworth, the Right Kind of Pride

“Why are you a substitute?”

December 7, 2023 Christopher Cudworth Leave a comment

For the last few years, I’ve been substitute teaching in four different public school districts in our area. I attended school in two of them, Kaneland from 8th through 10th grade, and St. Charles from Junior to Senior year.

That all came about from having transferred from one district to another during my sophomore year in high school. That wasn’t fun or easy, but I made it work thanks to my interest in sports and general ease in making friends. Twenty-five years after those events, I asked my father why we moved. I said “Dad, I was the top runner and Class President at the Kaneland.” But he told me, “I didn’t want your younger brother to play basketball in that slowdown offense at Kaneland.”

“What about me?” I replied.

“I knew you were a social kid,” he smiled. “I knew you’d survive.”

He was right. Thanks to cross country, basketball and track, plus art class and writing and Key Club and Prairie Restoration, I made lifelong friends.

But while the social and athletic side of life went well enough, I struggled with some subjects from an early age all the way through college. I would not learn until later in life that I was “blessed” with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. From grade school on I’d crush some subjects and do poorly or fail at others. In that respect, I had great company in an artist that I’d come to admire, one my favorites, in fact. Louis Agassiz Fuertes, a bird painter from the early 1900s. He was an artistic genius who also had a tough time with certain subjects. Here’s a clip from his biography.

That was me, too. I spent far too much class time either drawing or dreaming that I’d “come awake” at some point to the fact that I’d entirely lost the point of discussion. Teachers hated that. Attention deficit was poorly understood back then. I recall my mother having meetings with teachers to discuss my progress through the elementary and middle school years. My mother was a teacher also. She tutored kids at our home during after school hours and once told me, “These children have some learning challenges, so we don’t talk about them at school, okay?”

From fog to clarity

Throughout junior high and high school I felt moments of foglike distraction. It would take over my brain during certain classes, especially math, and of course algebra, a subject that bored and exasperated me. Once you’re behind in that class, you stay behind. I got a series of Ds in high school algebra.

But algebra required a type of executive function and organization at which my brain did not excel. I don’t care.

I did well in geometry because it involved shapes. I picked up a love of perspective and measurements from a seventh grade Industrial Drawing class in which the teacher was an taskmaster. We worked to be as perfect as possible during his guidance. I loved the demanding atmosphere. We took blocks of various construction and mapped them out with precise measurements to draw images on light green industrial drawing paper. Then we carefully labeled our drawings in all capital letters. I started write in all caps in everything I did, a habit that reverberates to this day. It all started in seventh grade.

An able substitute

That brings me to why I’m now a substitute teacher on top of my prime occupations of writer and an artist. As so often it happens in life, our perceived strengths can turn out to be weaknesses, and vice versa. Given the fact that I had trouble learning certain subjects in school and processing specific types of information in the work world, I’ve had a professional career much in keeping with my academic experience. Massive successes accompanied by distracted failures.

Many times I’ve wondered if I chose the right career path at all. About fifteen years ago, during a period when my late wife was fighting cancer and I was out of work taking care of her, I wrote a friend about getting back into the marketing world once she was well enough. In a kind and assertive way, he told me, “You know what? You should be a teacher.”

I’d considered that early in life because my mother was a teacher all her life. So was my brother, and I married a teacher back in 1985. That meant I visited tons of classrooms over the years. While I talked to much in most of those teaching opportunities, I slowly learned that teaching is actually getting students to learn by discussion rather than just telling them stuff. Based on that foundation of understanding, I’ve become an able substitute, certified to teach based on my college degree and education.

Those who can’t do, teach…

Perhaps I was haunted during my college years by a statement someone once made in my presence. It was patently false, but it sank into my conscience and never let go. They said, “Those who can’t do , teach.”

Along with my reading of Ayn Rand,’s The Fountainhead during my early 20s, I’d embraced the idea that creators of any kind cannot compromise their principles by “teaching” rather than doing. In my rebellious youth I came to view the teaching profession as somehow “giving in” or “giving up” on the things I loved to do, especially art and writing.

After watching the movie Mr. Holland’s Opus, I was moved by the character’s struggle to complete a symphony while juggling his commitment to teaching. Along the way, his “work” as a teacher motivated hundreds of students to “try hard things” as so many arts instructors encourage kids to do. That included a woman student who went on to become governor. The movie ends with a surprise performance of his “American Symphony” that encompassed influences from rock to classical music. It symbolized his desires to create and also stood for the advocacy he had for the arts in the face of the music program he loved being cancelled for lack of funding.

What Mr. Holland learned was that he should not be ashamed at having chosen the teaching profession. It did not mean that he “could not do.” Instead his gift was encouraging and demanding effort from others, and ultimately, from himself as well. His life was not perfect, yet some things were perfected as a result of his trying.

Another lifetime

I can’t say that I would have been a great teacher if I’d allowed myself to pursue that profession. I might well have run afoul of administration with my propensity for self-expression and a strong sense of social justice. I’ve known several teachers that were chased out of schools for the same thing. Yet I remain a strong advocate for public education. I believe in it because there is a darkness about privatizing education by allowing it to be taken over by those who want to censor reality in favor of ideology. There’s a genuine threat of that here in the United States of America. I’ve written books about that threat.

So I haven’t wasted my time or opportunity at what I’ve done. But one can imagine what it would be like to pursue a different path in another lifetime. I do have a talent for teaching. Once after an internal presentation at the marketing company where I worked as the Senior Copywriter, the head Creative Director came up and said, “You should do this for a living.”

That was ten years ago. Now that I’m at the age where getting hired in the creative industry is difficult due to factors such as ageism (“He must not be any good if he hasn’t retired yet…”) I am pushing forward with my art and writing. There are still bills to pay, and I learned the hard way that accepting Social Security when you’re earning too much results in penalties. I had to play catchup after eight years of caregiving through cancer survivorship with my late wife. That’s not easy.

So I’m a substitute teacher because it is the perfect balance of earning income and level of time commitment. Right now I’m in a full-time sub position for an art teacher that tore her Achilles tendon at a trampoline gym and needs a few weeks for rehab after surgery. Over the last three years I’ve taught everything from Pre-K (the age my late wife taught) to Middle School and High School. Every one of those assignments is interesting in its way. The little kids say the darndest things. The middle schoolers try to figure themselves out and the high school kids appreciate if you treat them like actual human beings.

One of the art projects the kids are doing is a self-portrait with one side realistic and the other their interests. My prep sketch.

I do love teaching. I’m not afraid to push kids when the subject presents opportunities to learn. I get them asking questions and let them proceed at their own pace at times. I’ve taught kids with learning difficulties, and have great empathy for them given my own academic history. That includes working as a paraprofessional at times, supporting kids one-on-one through the day if necessary, or just watching them so they don’t wander off on the playground.

I’m a substitute teacher because I like it. Grant you, I’ve got retired teacher friends who still help out in the classroom. Others are so done with teaching they never want to go near a school again. So it’s a they say, “To each their own.”

My approach is taking pride in what I’m doing at any given moment. That’s the Right Kind of Pride. We all arrive at circumstances in life from different timelines and varied perspectives. As the ending of the book Candide observes, and I paraphrase, “We must cultivate our own garden.”

And keep growing.

Art, Uncategorized

Social distancing: it works for me

March 19, 2020 Christopher Cudworth Leave a comment

Screech Owl — A life drawing of a screech owl by Christopher Cudworth, 1976

When it comes to the consequences of dealing with the risks of exposure to Coronavirus, it’s easy to feel put out by the fact that we’re supposed to stay in.

Yet I was thinking back to other times in my life when I spent time alone and apart from others, and some really nice memories cropped up to make me feel better.

In particular, I recall the relative isolation of a January term in college spent at the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology. I’d arranged to spend three weeks studying birds and was assigned to curate the entire collection of bird art housed at the Sapsucker Woods facility, which was then a stolid little building next to a pond far from the Cornell campus.

I arrived with $750 in my pocket and no place to stay. How my parents allowed me to take off on my own without talking about a place to live for three weeks in the snowy environs of Upstate

New York I don’t really know. They’d both grown up near Ithaca. They knew what the winters were like. My father attended Cornell and my mother went to college in Potsdam, even further north. I guess they figured I’d asked the question and found somewhere to live. All they knew was that I was enthused about studying bird art during my sophomore year in college and had visited the Lab one time before with an aunt that understood my love for the work of Louis Agassiz Fuertes.

So I took off for New York in my father’s big, white Buick LeSabre and arrived, all naive and eager, on the doorstep of the Lab with little else in mind than to do everything I’d dreamed about.

Fortunately, the director had mercy on my idiocy and found me a place to stay about a mile down the road from the main building. It was a house in the middle of rehab work. so it offered no running hot water, but it did have heat. I was only too glad to take it and I genuinely relished the time alone.

Wood Duck Bishop — Studies of drawing by Richard Bishop by Christopher Cudworth, 1976

Once that pragmatic issue was solved, I dove right away into the work of curating the Lab’s prodigious bird art collection. Some of it remained stored in cluttered chests of drawings and paintings donated by the estate of artists such as Richard Bishop. I carefully handled each of these works of art and copied some of the drawings in my own hand. For me, this was the Holy Grail of bird art, a look behind the scenes at some of the finest bird artists in the world.

In the morning I’d hide away in the closets out of sight from the occasional visitor staring at feeder birds outside the Lab windows. Feeling no compunction for human contact, and obsessed with the work before me, I went days without talking much to anyone.

And then I wandered over to the Hawk Barn where rare peregrine and gyrfalcons sat in cold pens, part of the breeding program set up at Cornell to revive the populations of those endangered birds in the wake of the pesticide devastation of the late 1960s and early 1970s. One day I stood peering through a tiny porthole doing drawings of a gyrfalcon and a set of peregrine inches away from my face. I felt no need to talk.

This went on for a week. I’d hike the mile to the Lab, curate or draw all day, eat a small sandwich along the way, and hike back after dark. It snowed at least an inch every day, so the world always looked fresh and inviting. The cold barely affected me.

Yet one night I finally felt the need to bathe and wash my thick head of hair. So I heated up some water on the stove, broke out a washcloth to take care of the vitals and then washed my hair under the sink. But it still required some heavy rinsing, so I took another deep pan of lukewarm water outside to stand in the snow and pour the water over my head. It was four degrees below zero outside.

Instantly my hair froze, but I wasn’t that worried about it. Yet when I’d stopped dripping and tipped my head up to look around, I felt something watching me. To be sure, it was one of the wolves from the Wolf Range peering at me through the darkness. It stood back from the fence a ways. I tipped my head back down and went inside. To this day it still feels like a dream. Perhaps it was.

Woodcock bishop — A pencil drawing after the work of Richard Bishop

For weeks I filled an art book with sketches and observations about my studies of bird art and works by masters such as George Miksch Sutton, Don Richard Eckleberry and Guy Coheleach. These were my heroes, and their work spoke to me in language as clear as an actual conversation. So I seldom needed to talk.

I only broke the relative vow of silence toward the end of the internship. I’d learned that a well-known artist lived near the Lab, so I fired up the LeSabre and was glad that it started at all, for it had a testy carburetor that tended to freeze over.

That afternoon I poured out questions to the artist, who kindly tolerated my aggressive curiosity, enthusiasm, and obsession with my own studies. He warned me that a career in bird art would likely never be lucrative, that one had to be lucky as well as good, but if you worked hard enough sometimes the two would combine.

That gave me pause of course. Perhaps I’d imagined that immersing myself in all that world-class art would somehow punch a ticket to the stardom I somewhat imagined for myself. So that interior dialog took up the rest of my time. It swirled inside my head as if my mind were an inside-out snowglobe matched by the daily batch of thick flurries falling from gray New York skies.

Grouse tail — A detail from at 1976 painting Great Horned Owl with Ruffed Grouse by Christopher Cudworth

But I was happy. The last day of my internship the Laboratory director took a look at my collection of paintings and was complimentary of some of the feather work. “But you need to look at the whole bird to be convincing in your work,” he quietly instructed me.

That would honestly be a lesson learned over a lifetime. I never became famous for my bird art but have sold more than a thousand paintings over the years. Some of them pop back into my life now and then, and I calmly critique those early works with the inner dialogue of a painter unafraid to be alone with his thoughts, or his endeavors.

That is the social distance that all of us consumed with the arts or writing tend to keep. It is the space between the praise and production that drives us to be our own best and worst critics. It involves quite a bit of interior dialogue and even time apart from all of humanity to find the truth. But nature is never the enemy. It is the type of social distancing that works for me. It always has. And it always will.

Christopher Cudworth is author of the book The Right Kind of Pride on Amazon.com

Art, Christopher Cudworth, trusting science

Drawing on the inspiration for a new day

March 2, 2020 Christopher Cudworth 4 Comments

In 1976 as a sophomore at Luther College, I was enrolled in a Field Biology class taught by Dr. David Roslien, a professor whose course was a deep dive into every aspect of the natural world. I still have the lab journals richly recording our trips into the snows of January to capture voles and mice, and standing hip-deep in chill waters to study frogs in the ponds of northeast Iowa.

I did well in certain aspects of the coursework, but when it came to labs and genetics and such, I struggled. In true evolutionary fashion, Dr. Roslien saw that my aptitudes as a true biologist were limited. But he admired my artistic abilities as evidenced in a series of illustrations I did during our studies of frog species.

I don’t recall what motivated me to engage in this depth of depiction, but I can say that I was inspired by all the things we were studying. Part of our classwork involved capturing specimens of seven or eight different frog species. I got after it and found them all that spring. Then I set out to paint them in watercolor.

Working from photographs I found in some book about frogs, I painted furiously over a period of two nights. The results were some of the most detailed illustrations I’d yet done in life. I was nineteen years old. And obsessed with real-life depictions.

The spring peeper and gray treefrog illustrations were inspired by real-life encounters shining flashlights to find specimens on chill spring nights. We’d listened as well to the daytime calls of chorus frogs singing from flooded ditches. And toads whistling from dusk well into the night.

But midway through the course, Dr. Roslien pulled me aside to let me know the truth about my future as a biologist. “I’ve not sure you’re a pure scientist,” I recall him sharing with me. “But you finish those six frog drawings and stuff those birds in that artsy way you do, and we’ll give you a B. But I’ve already talked to the Art Department. They’re eager to have you over there.”

And that’s how it transpired that I became an Art Major with a minor in English. I didn’t give up wildlife art. In fact I sold hundreds of paintings over the years. While I didn’t become world-famous during the peak of the wildlife art boom in the late 70s and through the 80s, I did get chosen for some world-class shows at the Brookfield Zoological Society and other venues.

It was a competitive scene for sure. Many wildlife artists depended on photos to create original works. Some copied them outright, even projecting images on the canvas to copy the exact details.

Recently I got to see the frog drawings I’d done all those years ago. They’d existed mostly in my mind for the last 40+ years. I knew that I’d done an exceptional job on detail back then. I took great pride in doing so, working on the craft of “getting things right.” That’s always a good thing.

But my real pleasure comes in knowing that my professor lovingly framed and preserved those drawings as kept them as a symbol of his teaching and influence on a young man hoping to find his way in the world.

So while I’m not famous as an artist in terms of wealth or following, it has been a great journey nonetheless. And seeing those paintings from long ago offers inspiration for a new day.

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