REMEMBERING WHEN: The art class ash tray
By Keith Schell
When I was graduating from eighth grade and about to enter high school, I was faced with the daunting task of picking the classes I would take in my first year. Not having a clue about what I wanted to be—or what classes I should take—made the decision difficult.
Some courses were mandatory, like Math and English. But we also had a few optional electives, and one of those was Art. I loved drawing and sketching back then and thought it would be a great way to learn more about the medium. So, I chose Art as one of my electives in my first year of high school. I ended up liking it enough to continue taking it for all four years.
As I eventually learned, many of the students who took Art every year did so because they thought it was an easy credit. And to be fair, in some ways, it was. The students weren’t the only ones who felt that way either. I heard through the grapevine many years later that when the art teacher retired, the high school shop teacher applied for the art teacher’s job. The shop teacher! For obvious reasons, he didn’t get the position.
Our high school art teacher was a wonderful woman who taught us many traditional art practices—sculpting, pointillism, wood carving, ceramics—and even threw in a bit of Canadian art history on the side. She dedicated about a week to each subject.
When it came time to begin the ceramics portion of the class, she asked us on the Friday before to think over the weekend about what we wanted to make. We’d start our ceramics projects the following Monday.
By Monday, everyone had different ideas. One girl wanted to make a little statue. One smart-alecky guy wanted to make a giant beer stein! The list of ideas was long and varied.
As for me, I still wasn’t sure. Ceramics was not my thing. Maybe a cup or a bowl? I thought about it over the weekend but couldn’t decide. I just started working that week and hoped inspiration would strike.
As the week went on and I realized my ceramics project wasn’t turning out as well as I’d hoped, it slowly morphed into the old high school art class fallback for uninspired and untalented students:
I made an ash tray.
It was about three inches high, eight inches in diameter, and had three large notches around the rim to hold cigarettes. I painted it with a sky-blue glaze, which came out rather nicely after it was fired in the school kiln. It was unspectacular at best—but not too bad for someone who had no idea what he wanted to make.
When it was finished, fired, and graded, I think I probably got a high “C”—something like that. It was okay, but it wasn’t great.
To me, art is good if it looks like what it’s supposed to look like. And while my ceramics project was certainly nothing special, it definitely looked like an ashtray. So, in that respect, I guess it was a success.
But it never held ashes after I brought it home. Around the house, it held buttons, paper clips, marbles, coins, bobby pins—any little bits of bric-a-brac that needed a place to go. And that was fine by me. At least it served a useful purpose.
These days, my high school art class ashtray has been lost to the ages. I’m sure it’s still somewhere in my mother’s house. Maybe one day we’ll stumble across it while looking for something completely unrelated. Who knows?
And to all the other untalented former high school art students out there—I hope your art class ashtrays turned out okay too!