By Sarah Montague
In the course of interviewing and profiling creative academics for our Parsons Notes series, I’ve made choices based on impact, proximity, timeliness, and craft, but I think my interview with Marc Lepson may have the most unusual starting point: manifest happiness.
This semester, I taught an Integrated Seminar class in the University Center. Every Monday night, on my way home, I would pass the open door of Lepson’s Imaging/Drawing classroom, and look in on a busy and excited collection of students, waving drawings in the air, or listening as Lepson critiqued something.
The eager energy of this class spilled right out into the corridor and I wanted to know what was behind it.
Lepson has degrees in literature, photography and print making, and is himself a painter and illustrator. But in between appointments at Parsons (first in 2003, and then since 2017) he’s been a kindergarten teacher and a taxi driver, among other things.
Drawing/Imaging combines teaching traditional, manually executed creation with the ways in which ideas might be extended in the digital realm.
“So we start with very introductory things–everyone’s on the same level. And what I like about it is that with some very basic skills, the students are then equipped to work with ideas in lots of different ways.”
And, Lepson has a bit of a mission:
“There’s a really wide range of experience and skill levels, which is more work as a teacher, but it’s also a lot of fun because starting from the very beginning will hopefully break some bad habits that people might have learned in high school and present students who are new to drawing with fresh approach.”
“The very beginning” includes basic drawing skills—freehand and with a live model–and then progressing to the use of digital programs such as Photoshop and Illustrator.
I ask if the students are introduced to the masters at this point (drawing always makes me think of Michelangelo and Durer) .
“As far as I know, there isn’t an art historical survey that students are required to take in the first year program. So I feel it’s part of my responsibility in the context of drawing and imaging to give them a little taste of different eras and different kinds of ways to work. We have a baseline of technical skills, so then we can move into things that are more expressive and creative.”
For example, a midsemester project builds on work with perspective drawing and architectural spaces to reimagine Times Square—which goodness knows, invaded as it is by visually shrill tourist traps, skyscraper-sized billboards, and an infestation of Disney characters—could use some reimagining.
In 1989 Paul Goldberger, also a New School faculty member, wrote a piece in the New York Times called “Times Square: Pausing to Weep.”
But at least in Lepson’s classroom, it can be rescued by imagination: “I say , ‘what if Times Square were, you know, run by frogs, what would it look like? Or, you know, if Times Square was underwater, which it may be, what will it look like?”
For their final project, the students get to “own” a bit of the city.
“The courses all have key words and ours is place. This semester, the final project was called Portrait of a Place, New York City.”
The students are not asked to create a literal portrait, but an imagined one.
“So thinking of it like that–how do you give an impression of a place where you’re not necessarily representing it realistically? We talk about abstraction, distortion, creating mood through color. There has to be a digital element to it. There has to be a hands-on element to it. We’re going work with a certain size, in a certain media.”
The students are sent forth to research a few places, and choose the one that interests them the most.
“They draw it, photograph it, take it apart, put it back together.”
“They take it apart, and put it back together’ sounds like a reasonable model for life as well as art.
I ask Lepson how the advent of digital technologies has changed the field, and teaching practice.
“I think for artists who were practicing before the real hardcore digital era, it’s maybe easier to see the digital tools as tools, and not as something to get sucked into and overwhelmed by, at least for me.
So, I make sure to keep well versed in the digital world, but I’m more interested in the hands-on personally.”
And what satisfies him most as a teacher?
“There’s two parts that are gratifying. The process itself is extremely gratifying. I really enjoy the structure of being able to talk to people who are smart and interested and sharing with them things that I know and then seeing what they do with it.
The other is seeing finished results, where you walk into a room and there’s twenty people who you’ve been talking to for three months about their thoughts, their ideas, their feelings, the way that things are made. And then, you know everybody has an expression of those things up on the wall.”
And I had to ask—did either driving a taxi, or teaching kindergarten—provide useful approaches to teaching art to undergraduates?
“Yes. The taxi driving, you know, you’re just exposed to a lot of different kinds of people and a lot of different contexts every day.
And kindergarten requires a lot of patience, and a lot of openness and a lot of unconditional love really. “
In the context of undergraduates, it’s less about protection, and more about freedom.
“You know, we have to give them the benefit of the doubt in almost all situations. I think bringing that kind of feeling to the classroom–every single person has their own experience and there’s something really important there. And so starting from that place is a lot better than starting from the other side–assuming that nobody has anything to offer.”
And all of this contributes to the phenomenon that first got me interested in Lepson’s class and teaching style. The humorist Patricia Marx wrote a novel called Starting from Happy. What did that mean to him?
“One thing is, I like to prop the door open.”
Possibly an act of defiance.
“I’m guessing it’s happening in a lot of places, but the doors in this building are fire doors. You can’t really prop ’em open so easily.”
And then, there’s what happens beyond the doors:
“I give a lot of credit to the students. They really come to the classroom interested in what’s going on. And I try to create an atmosphere where the people in the room feel comfortable about asking whatever questions they want to explore, whatever avenues. To be themselves in a way.”
And is Lepson himself happy?
His answer is candid, but upbeat.
“Sometimes things are frustrating and sometimes things are difficult. But for me, being in the classroom is the part that I enjoy the most. I don’t do it for the bureaucratic reasons or the administrative reasons or the prestige of teaching at a university so much as thinking, when you get up in the up in the morning, where are you going ? And for me, yeah, being in the classroom with other people is a good thing to be doing,”
The next time you’re in the UC, join him. Look for that open door and step into happy.