~by Brian Blair
Amanda Mathis doesn’t frame her art classes with students’ traditional meditative stillness. On a recent resplendent June afternoon outside at the Brown County Art Gallery, she gathered 25 wired enrollees in her youth art camp for a stroll toward creativity—at a nearby cemetery.
The idea was to allow young people, from second through fifth grade, to find inspiring art in some unlikely places, and to burn off some of their hyperkinetic energy.
“This is definitely a summer camp,” she said referring to the daylong sessions stretching over five days.
A camp for an older group of young people is also offered in July for sixth graders through age 16.
The offerings began in 2017 for the youngsters before spreading three years ago to senior adults, too. “And it’s not school,” she said. The Indiana Artisan, and member of the Brown County Art Gallery Association, is a well-known Brown County “educated primitive” artist, as she puts it, and is big on teaching discovery and wonder in her sessions.
At the most recent class in the gallery’s studio room, Mathis and volunteer assistants Ruby Wagers and granddaughter Sophie Mathis guided youngsters through acetate portraits, marked by layered, piecemeal sheets to make a whole image. If the exercise looked a lot like pop art, then heavens to Andy Warhol—that’s much of the idea.
Only Mathis encourages the kids to birth their own creativity before ever showing them examples from polished pros. “If I do that beforehand,” Mathis said, “they shut down.” In other words, they grow intimidated by seeing others’prowess first. But they seem to blossom under the encouragement of Mathis. Kimoy Bennett, the gallery’s education director, has seen such firsthand.
“The kids just love Amanda,” Bennett said. “She’s clearly a very fun instructor. She’s not strict with them. She simply wants them to be free to express all their creativity. And even before we got grants to support this work, she was willing to volunteer to do it just to give back to the community.
Today, that support comes from the Brown County Community Foundation, Indiana Heritage Arts, and the Indiana Arts Commission.
“But without the gallery’s enthusiasm, this never would have happened,” Mathis said.
Bennett mentioned that Mathis has made the classes, which almost always have a waiting list, popular from the beginning.
“You know that it takes a very special person with just the right approach and just the right temperament to teach nearly all ages,” Bennett said.
Five hours into the latest class, 7-year-old Axel Fowler said he liked the gathering.
“I’m already a very good artist,” Fowler said nonchalantly.
Mathis loves to see youngsters blossom while learning a range of mediums and styles. The impact stretches far beyond these brushes with art.
“With so many of these kids, I’ve seen the confidence from art carry over [into other areas],” she said.
Although these classes and her earlier after-school instruction have included some who now pursue art as their chosen vocation, Mathis aims for enrollees to first understand the grand joy of creating amid acrylics, watercolors, pastels, and more.
Mathis’s parents enrolled her in private lessons early in her native Lafayette. Their own extensive art collection also served as motivation for an artist whose work now hangs in private collections in the United States, Canada, France, Germany, England, and Spain.
But the students keep her grounded. In fact, she has said that she is especially proud that her art highlights “child-like qualities.” “Really, I’m still just one of them,” she said. Oh, but she is much more, too. How could she not be, now in her seventh decade, as she likes to say, of a life of works featuring figures and animals without faces—all to encourage the beholder to lean in a little more.
I believe that artists almost always see things just a little differently than other people,” she said.
Art, Make Friends.” “Well, we are friends,” she said. The senior classes for those 55 and older include four months of creativity, learning, and fellowship, with eight sessions per month, each with a different theme. Supplies are included.
Support for these classes comes from an anonymous donation from a gallery foundation board member to honor his late mother.
Ideally, Mathis is at the stage of teaching where she loves it as much as ever. Yet, in the coming few years, she would like to bring in someone to assume the leadership post for the youngest group, while she continues with the other classes.
“But the first thing I have to ask them is ‘Do you love kids? ’ ” she said. Her supply of energy remains. Right now,” she said, “I just can’t stop teaching.”
For information on Amanda Mathis’ classes contact the Brown County Art Gallery at 812-988-4609.