Ajay Kurian's "Your Flowers" for Karl Connolly

The Reluctant Nurturer

It was my Sophomore year in High School and we were told that this would be our art teacher’s final year.  She was beloved and fit the kooky white woman art teacher to a “t”.  She was strong and opinionated, passionate about her students and about creativity.  We were saddened by her retirement but more importantly, we wanted to know who would be next?  

It would be Karl Connolly. A professional artist and professor at MICA would be coming in to teach a bunch of private school boys about art.  I wasn’t sure what that would mean for us, but in the two years that I had Karl, my life irrevocably changed.  Art had been a place where I excelled through ability and technique, but through Karl, I started to understand that art could be a place for ideas to materialize, for a person to investigate the world they live in with purpose, pleasure, and criticality.  

Karl is Irish - he came to America on his own when he was sixteen.  His Irish accent lingers so many years later - we would relish the moments he would say “Wedn’s day” or a handful of other words in order to mimic and playfully mock his pronunciation.  He was trained like an old master - his surfaces were well prepared and slick and he could develop chiaroscuro reminiscent of Caravaggio.  His paintings from that time were largely allegorical, layering in various philosophical discourses into the image and push a kind of skepticism towards a painting practice that nevertheless looked like it believed.  Suffice to say he had our attention.  At that age, we could still be wowed by technical ability, and it was really the bait for everything else we were about to learn.  Most people took Art Class because they wanted an easy A or just some time to goof off.  There were always a few of us that had higher aspirations, but many had no real desire to engage and were more “future frat bro” than artist.  Nevertheless, Karl was always able to slow us down, to have us look closely at whatever it was we were meant to pay attention to, and challenge us to understand what we see.  Every semester, he would take a group of kids who had various aptitudes for art and show them all that they could in fact draw, could in fact treat it as a skill that one could get better at, and in the process give them a sense that their intellectual world could be expanded too.  By the age of 17, I had read Arthur Danto’s “After the End of Art”, devoured Gerhard Richter’s journals, contemplated the strangeness of Sigmar Polke, and marveled at the impossible difficulty of Gilles Deleuze’s book on Francis Bacon.  I was also learning how to really draw and paint for the first time.  

Karl called the Art Room, the “No Nurture Zone”, which is funny because it was anything but that.  I could never tell if it was another kind of “bait” to coerce a rowdy group of testosterone fueled boys into thinking about apples and pears and landscapes, light, feeling, and thought, and the way you move charcoal over paper to develop a mark that matched the terrain we hoped to evoke.  He was frank, direct, and funny and this made him endearing.  He never preached his ideas, he leveled with us in order to show why he cared so fucking much.  He cursed quite a bit and didn’t mind when we joined him.  He knew that maintaining order and authority had nothing to do with the basic school rules, but everything to do with how we treated one another, and how he shared himself, his knowledge, and his thoughts.  We trusted him because he trusted us.  And when we broke that trust he would let us know directly and clearly that we messed up and we have to make it right. 

He heard the problems of many students without ever asking them to share.  He simply sat at his desk, and the couch that abutted it became a kind of therapist’s couch where we would all take a turn eventually. After 9/11, I went to the art room and told him that I’m basically screwed now.  I’m now going to be treated as if I could be a terrorist.  I don’t remember what he said to me, but I do remember that I had the space to say these things, and I really needed it. I could talk about almost anything in the art room, and Karl would usually listen and hold space.  I didn’t have the language back then to understand what that meant or how it would imprint my ideas of leadership, kindness, and authority.  Karl made me take art seriously, and he believed in me.  When he saw people who wanted to push themselves, he gave them more space and more resources to do so.  And when he saw people needed a break, he would give them that too.  

Back then, when he came to our school, he said he would be there for two years tops and then he’d get out.  When I tell you that he is still there, I mean it as a sign of his greatest success rather than as any kind of failure.  He is a fixture of that school, and has made so many generations of young men that much more ready for thinking through a world that is so difficult to process.  I don’t know if I would have taken the path I did were it not for him.  He showed us how cool it could be to care about how we see.  Here are his flowers.