on change

Whenever I am in Toronto I start thinking about Donald Boutros, who was my high school art teacher from 1990 to 1995. His is one of the few steady faces I can recall from that blurred savage time. Though I must have been in there only a handful of times, I can remember  his office perfectly.  A low wooden desk had a magical drawer full of slides (slides! I feel fortunate to have made it to the end of adolescence before being set adrift in the digital age, to have been a witness to a time when things could be lost forever, or forgotten, or buried too deep to be unearthed) of paintings and sculptures and plinths and sketches and woodprints and shards of pottery and ancient godesses with large flat eyes.  They were in no order at all, just piled in together in a way that would have made it impossible to put together a lecture except completely at random.   Each September Donald Boutros would sit on one of the studio’s low stools, one leg crossed over the other, a plastic slipper dangling from his foot, and he would take a deep breath, and he would say something like: ‘This year, students, everything is going to be different’. There couldn’t be a more perfect expression of what it feels like to be young–that everything should be always new, that different is a synonym for better, that change is valuable for the simple reason that it wards off stagnation. I think the single most important thing I learned in that studio, which smelled of linseed and pigment and pencil shavings and turpentine, of radiators and bagged lunches and chewing gum and soap, was about work. ‘Quantity, students, not quality!’ Donald Boutros used to say. It sounds ridiculous, but he was warning us, I think, never to love what we had made more than we loved what we hadn’t yet made. He was teaching us how to dream.

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