Woodsie Project

Class taken at UNC of Greensboro with Professor Maria Lim in the Spring of 2019.

Woodsie

Woodsie - Andrea Santolim Geller

Woodsie’s a hell-of-a-person, teacher, and friend to me. We really did get to know each other my first year at Weaver in a muddle of hate. I judged her for her scrambled-ness and she, my arrogant curiosity. The more she assumed me to be a brat (probably entirely justified), the more I assumed her to be a boring, crazy art teacher. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Of our entire Visual Arts class of 2016, I’m probably the alumni who sees her the most regularly nowadays. She did indeed become a paralegal, very recently after my mother became a paralegal herself! Knowing that even the teacher I felt inspired by could let go of visual arts entirely in her day-to-day life and pursue an entirely new career, I found comfort, and decided to do something along the same.

Obviously, I am much younger and have spent but a decade honing my craft, whereas she’s spent many! Nonetheless, I no longer found inspiration in paints and pencils and glue and scissors. No, I want to read and write now. However, the reading and writing stems from the same vein of curiosity, of engaging with a project like the art pieces taught and guided by Mrs. Woods, created by myself.

I had to do more than one book, obviously. One book wouldn’t have done her justice -- she’s too wild to look like everyone else. She’s too big to fit into one box. She’s too colorful to paint only one cover. No, she had to be represented by multiple “blocks.”

The pages were irrelevant. Once selected, these books were entirely devoted to their purpose. I glued them together first to literally and symbolically bind them; they were now a solid entity, a creature which moved as a whole. It was in Mrs. Woods’s classes that I first discovered my fixation with composition. She had us develop crazy compositions for our work(s). Once, we used an 18’’x24’’ surface to illustrate, in colored pencil, a piece that couldn’t have been larger than 8’’x8’’. I thought she was crazy at the time. Why would anyone draw so small an image, on a “canvas” (it was just a piece of paper) so large?

I think I’m beginning to understand the depth of her passion and frustration for her art… For her life. She devoted herself to something so strongly that it unraveled a certain thread which ultimately tied her to the thing she’d devoted herself to! Perhaps it’s simpler than that. Maybe every other part of her life pulled her farther and farther from it, and the rope in between her and her passion grew thinner and thinner until it just snapped. Maybe it’s deeper than that: maybe there were many strings between her and the artworks, and they wrapped themselves around her so many times to a point where she could no longer breathe, she had to cut her way out… or be otherwise stuck, stagnant, forever.

I don’t know, but I don’t want to know. I never want to get to that point. Painting, drawing, crafts -- these are all elements of self expression that I never want to fully or emotionally detach from. This envelopment I hoped to have demonstrated in the use of the own books’ pages as covers for the sections of pages I did not cut out. By then connecting the pages in between, the audience has no choice but to pull the pages apart to truly view the content. However, the entire creation is a work in itself! It doesn’t undermine the pieces within, but rather emphasizes the holistic ideology that is Woodsie’s, as a visual artist’s, true legacy.

She called it being a teacher, but there’s more to it. Everywhere she goes, one way or another, the room makes it about her. Or does she make the room make it about her? Where is the line drawn in between?

Tom and Jacob may test Woodsie’s own patience, but I gotta give it to ‘em, they have a lot of it in return for her. Tom is a logical artist. He developed a graphic design career out of his work. Jacob is the amalgamation of the two, but that hasn’t stopped him from being a brilliant and unique individual. Woodsie and Tom have raised a flourishing young man.

Take, again, people in general. How do we know Woodsie? Do we actually know her? Is it indeed as simple as what she says, that she was tired of it all? I think so. But could any of us have predicted her to give everything away? To get rid of her studio? To retire, and not look back? To actually sit her ass down and read a book after years and years of commitment to Weaver Academy, to her hundreds and thousands of mentees, to kids like me?

I don’t think I can say I was surprised, but it was definitely not expected. I won’t say I can’t see her doing all that, but I would never have predicted that she’d set out to be a paralegal… And succeed, at that!

The taking of turns throughout her life is hopefully evident in how the books are glued together: the piece takes turns of its own, the viewer takes turns at each page, and the audience takes turns round and round in order to take in each part of it. Woodsie’s devotion is again demonstrated by my decision to limit myself to the pages available to me. After all, she was entirely limited by the position of an art teacher, the label of a female artist, and the literal lack of tools, materials, and finances that a female artist art teacher experiences every day.

I love Woodsie so much. I can only hope to have portrayed a piece of who she is in this work. I think the most important part of it all is that I had fun. From her interview, to figuring out what the heck the pictures of the pieces she sent me were of and which detail shots went to the fully photographed images, to putting it altogether and problem-solving ways to incorporate everything by having the books be able to open and close, simultaneously displaying its pages properly. I know that at this point, she’d stress the actual enjoyment (and I do mean that ironically) of creating the work over the technicalities of what the work accomplishes. She’s probably the only mentor or adult figure in my life that was immediately supportive of my decision to stray from the path of the “artist” that everyone wanted for me.

Thank you, Woodsie, for everything you’ve done for me!!