Finding Sublime Inspiration

At her home in Ashland, Virginia, Upper School ceramics teacher Mary Arzt has what she calls her “cabinet of curiosities.” The cabinet contains a collection of oddities, random natural objects that in some way strike her as interesting or beautiful — natural crystals, shells, a moose antler. Like her own mind, it’s a well of inspiration she draws from without complete comprehension of the inspiration’s origins or where it will lead her. “These things I collect I see, in a way, as an accumulation of what engages me,” Arzt says. “What I look at and what I think about are what inspire me, and this begins the creative process. My mind — it’s like a soup in there. Sometimes you drop in a ladle, pull it up and it all comes together.” As both an artist and teacher, she’s come to embrace the confounding chaos of her creativity.

To help make her point, she pulls out a resplendently pink barnacle, huge, about the height and shape of a hand, with five pencil-sized holes sprouting from it. She likes to begin each semester of ceramics classes with a group project, Arzt explains, but, this spring, she wasn’t sure what kind of path to pursue. “And then I thought of pinch pots, and I thought that maybe the students could join each pinch pot together. Then, suddenly: barnacles!” She lets out a laugh, giddy with her assigned project. “I thought, ‘How did I make that jump? How did I get from group project to pinch pots to barnacles?’ Well, that’s the creative process, and it’s there in teaching just as much as it is in art.”

Formerly the arts department chair, Arzt, a professional painter, now focuses her class time on ceramics, and she encourages her students to embrace that murky process of creation. “Especially if you’re teaching art, instruction becomes a creative act,” Arzt says. “But, like art, there’s also that aspect of human connection and finding answers to the question of how to share something you care about in a way that others can understand. That matter of connection, of helping students make that extra step of really putting something of themselves in a piece, is what I try to foster in the classroom.”

 

In her own work, Arzt paints large canvases with unusual depictions of trees that slip between the natural and the relentlessly abstracting memory of the natural. They approach realist figuration but, similar to the dizzying sensation of staring at trees, the tangible reality melts to a more luxurious abstraction. Light swirls around the leaves, the branches, the two humming together and creating something deeper than all nature. Each leaf, each branch, makes a shape for itself while also describing shapes around it. The visions blur splendidly. “I’m interested in positive and negative space,” Arzt explains. “I’m playing with how the object and the space interact. And if you think about that as a whole — not just as leaves and sky — but that whole form of how those shapes work together — that is interesting to me. It’s an ongoing exploration in my work.” 

Like the turning of leaves, Arzt works seasonally; she lets inspiration come to a steady boil before, each winter and spring, making her way to the studio she has in her house. She typically aims to have a collection of pieces ready to exhibit by summertime. Work begets work, she says; the process of teaching informs, subliminally, her art, and her art finds its way into the classroom. “I’m not a person who is going to sit and meditate,” she says, “but I do love the quiet, total engagement that art offers. It takes discipline, but once I’m really in my space, everything just comes together, very similar to teaching.”

Editor’s Note: Appearing first in the spring 2024 Spark, this piece is part of a feature series on Upper School visual art teachers who themselves are practicing artists.