by Lexi Whitlow
He starts to speak but I wave him off and keep moving.
Chapter 4
Hayes
Do I look like a college professor?
This is not New York or London. This is Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the provincial, unsophisticated, anti-fashion world. It’s hard to know exactly how to present. I check myself in the mirror. While it’s difficult to screw up the classics, I’m probably succeeding. I’ve chosen a pale blue Oxford cloth button down and slim cut Levi’s so new they’re still stiff. A pair of scruffy brown Redwing boots rounds out the preppy vibe, ideally striking a balance between ‘I don’t give a shit,’ and ‘You better take me seriously.’ The tie I select is a blue and black silk number from Bottega Veneta and emphasizes the ‘seriously’ part.
Today is the first day of classes and I’ve got a full schedule.
My first class, Design 1 with incoming sophomores, isn’t until 10:30, but I have faculty meetings to keep me busy until then. On the way to my office I take the long way around through the studios to see if anyone’s there yet. I’ll give props to anybody moving in early.
I’m sadly disappointed. The place is dark, quiet, and empty. I step into the sprawling room, crowded with desks and stacked chairs. I reach to my left flipping on the lights, flooding the room in a greenish florescent bath.
In a far corner, over by the couch, a small movement catches my eye.
I walk in to the room further and spy a form huddled under a blanket, curled up, a backpack shoved under her head for a pillow. Chloe. That chestnut-colored mop of wild curls is unmistakable.
Jesus. Is she sleeping here? That must be against the rules.
I feel bad for this poor girl, but her circumstances can’t be so awful that she’s forced to squat in the studios. Why not get a hotel room? Anything but this. Where the hell is she showering? What is she eating? How long is she planning on doing this? Seriously, my kids are going to be working in this studio at all hours if I have anything to say about it. This is not cool.
Right now, I have bigger concerns. My first meeting starts in five minutes and I need to top off my coffee. Chloe will have to wait.
In grad school, especially at The Royal Collage, I got a taste of what it is to function inside the status-obsessed, politically charged hierarchy of academia. But damn. The administration and faculty here at VCU put The Royal Collage to shame. I’m two hours locked in a room with a group of graying, disheveled, rambling-on-about-god-only-knows-what, over-grown toddlers; each of them trying to one-up the other and convince themselves (because they sure as hell aren’t convincing anyone else,) that their agenda item for the meeting is the most crucially important consideration the school has faced in a generation.
Dr. Bledsoe of Art Education spends thirty minutes debating with Dr. Daugherty from Art History the merits of her future elementary school art teachers being required to take five sections of Art History, when all the other majors are only required to take three. Bart Chamberlain of Ceramics spends a solid fifteen minutes describing the new OSHA requirements for safe handling of powdered glaze mixes and how three of his graduate students must be trained on the procedure and certified before lead glaze can be used in the classroom or studios.
Does everyone really need to know this? Apparently, they do, because four other professors chime in, asking the Dean why their grad students can’t attend the training also.
And now it’s my bosses turn.
Liza is wearing a power suit in periwinkle gabardine, jacket open, and a damn near transparent silk blouse imprinted with a Japanese floral print. Her cleavage is showing, and that’s no accident. She stands up on her six-inch Manolo Blahnik heels, tipping forward, laying her palms on the table in front of her, ass out, tits down.
She opens her speech with a tone of moral authority.
“I’m sure some of you are aware—many of you may not be—that a few of the students, particularly in the painting and sculpture departments, have taken to living in, literally, have moved into, their studios. This isn’t acceptable, and it needs to be stopped before it gets out of hand. The VCU School of Art is not a homeless shelter. First offense penalty for this is loss of studio privileges for the term, and we need to enforce it. I do enforce it in my department.”
Mike Kraus, Art Center Librarian, tentatively raises his hand.
“Do you have something you’d like to add, Michael?” the Dean, Dr. Hunt asks.
Michael swallows hard. It’s clear he’s not accustomed to speaking up in these things.
“It’s just that… well… some of the kids here… they don’t have a lot of resources. And the rents have exploded over the last few years as the neighborhoods around school gentrify. They all work so hard and they spend so much on materials…”
“And if they can’t afford it, they should leave,” Liza shuts him down. “This is a University. They’re here to go to school. But we’re not in the business of providing free room and board to every urchin who makes it through the door. And why is it just the fine arts kids who are slumming through here like beggars? You don’t see our kids in applied arts squatting in the studios or tipping the Coke machines for spare change.”
Oh, she did not just go there.
“Could it be that we hold our kids to a higher set of expectations? Maybe that’s it.”
That conversation turned nasty quick.
The Dean—wisely—shuts it down before it goes any further by reminding his faculty that it’s against the rules for students to move in to their studios.
I realize I need to get Chloe moving or she’s going to be in worse shape than she is now. I’m still racking my brain trying to figure out why she’s in this situation. Guy had plenty of money. He was successful. His daughter shouldn’t be crashing on a couch like an orphan.
“That went well,” Liza gloats as the meeting breaks up. She closed the thing by introducing me, waxing on way too long about my background, detailing everywhere I’ve worked all over the world, along with my professional accomplishments. I saw a couple of the professors stifling yawns. “And they were all extremely impressed with you.”
She bats her eyelashes at me, smiling suggestively, lingering behind the last of the faculty and staff who file out of the conference room. “I know you’ve got your first class to get to, and so do I, but can I take you lunch afterwards?”
I return her smile to the best of my ability. “Regrettably, I’ve scheduled FA meetings for my break block between noon and two for the rest of the week. I’ll take a rain check.”
As the last of our colleagues exit the room, Liza reaches up and straightens my collar, flattening it, brushing a piece of imaginary lint away from my shoulder.
“Dinner then?” she presses. “I really want to hear how your first day went.”
This is going be harder than I hoped.
“Humm,” I hedge, thinking quickly. “I’ll have to take a rain check on that too. I’ve got a plumber coming over this evening—bad drains upstairs.”
She scowls.
“How about we meet for breakfast in the morning,” I offer; it’s a much safer alternative. “I haven’t seen the faculty club. I hear they put on a spread.”
She smiles, a little less disappointed than before. “Alright. Let’s meet at seven-thirty tomorrow morning. See you there?”
“Perfect.” I’m certain that’s not going to be the last time I’ll need to duck a date with her.
Liza is going to pose challenges for me. I knew this the minute I met her, when I came for my first interview. She’s maybe forty-five years of age or a bit more, and extremely conscious of her physical presentation. She dresses immaculately. Her hair is long, polished, styled, and her precision make-up does double-time to conceal the fact of thin lines creasing her eyes, her lips, her jawline. She’s one of those women of a certain age who was singled out for her beauty when she was young, and who is now trying to hang on to the recollection of that youthful advantage with every tool and cheat she can con
ceive of or purchase.
I’ve known a lot of women like her, some better than others. She’s to be handled with absolute care and deference to her unsteady place in the world. I noted the look in her eye when she first saw me. It’s best described as a bit hungry. She’s like a lioness without cubs to tend. She needs constant feeding to keep her from turning on the entire pride. Or maybe the better analogy is a Cougar. Either way, I’m going to need to watch my back with Liza. I suspect she has sharp teeth and a short tempter.
My first class of sophomores is about what I expect. They’re eager, bright-eyed, and intrigued that their professor is just a few years older than they are. Almost all the girls and about half the guys are over-the-top flirty. I’ve been over this road and I know where it can go, so I shut them down straight out of the gates.
While they blink at me and stare gape-mouthed, I explain that we have exactly twelve weeks together, and in those twelve weeks they’re going to work harder than they’ve ever worked, sleep less than they’ve ever slept, they’re going to just begin to scratch the surface of what it means to think about graphic design from a conceptual standpoint. They’re going to dazzle me with their master craftsmanship and perfect technical command of the tools of the trade, or they’re going to go home and change majors. It’s just that simple.
My introductory speech begins as a challenge.
“I know each of you think you know your way around what it means to be a designer because you can do all manner of pretty shit in InDesign and have hundreds of different filters loaded in Photoshop. That isn’t design. That’s decoration and any tenth-grader can learn to do it well enough to get a job somewhere. I’m going to teach you—or at least begin to teach you—how the world of art and design are put together, elementally.”
I reach into my bag, retrieving my copy of FontBook.
“By the end of this term you’ll have completed six different design projects, and this...”
I see them regarding the book. It’s a huge thing. More than a thousand pages.
“This is one of the two required texts for this class and I expect you to have a copy of it in your hands by Wednesday. Inside this book is a full rendering of almost every type face that’s ever been put into production. Twenty-six thousand of them, give or take. Every week you’ll provide me with three tracings, in ink, on Mylar, done at three hundred percent scale or better, mounted and matted for presentation. At the end of the term you should have an exact, handmade copy of at least thirty-six different fonts chosen from each section of this book. If you do more than thirty-six you get extra credit, less than that and you fail. This project is a third of your grade.”
They start grumbling and looking at one another like I’m criminally insane.
I have them on the hook. Let’s see if I can snag them. I walk through their ranks, speaking to them from whatever functioning heart they think I have left.
“The hand connects to the brain, people. You believe you see with your eyes, but you only really know something by feel. It’s an intimate act, producing something by hand. Feeling its edges and angles. I promise you that by the time you’ve done a dozen of these tracings, you’ll appreciate why I’m asking you to do it. You’ll also never look at typography, at the shape and proportion or the form of letters the same way again. You’ll know them viscerally. Intimately. Like you know—” I pause and smile coyly, shaking my head at them. “I better not go there. Might be over your heads just yet.”
That gets a nervous, embarrassed laugh, just as it did when it was delivered to me by Guy Harvey when I was fifteen-years-old.
I spend most of the rest of the class showing the kids how to use the large format digital camera in the photo lab, so they can make enlargements on paper for their tracings. Honestly, if I had my way, I’d prefer to teach them on the antique stat camera in the room next door, but that would just be cruel and unusual punishment for these digital kids. We’ll do some analog stuff, but I can’t ask too much of them too soon.
The art library is a block away from the big neo-gothic structure that houses my classes and studios. It’s located in a renovated retail space; a mid-century modern structure of glass and steel. It’s the kind of antiseptic building I love to hate. That said, it serves its purpose as a library. The place appears bereft of human activity when I arrive at the main desk looking for a research librarian to assist me.
I have exactly one hour to accomplish my goal before my next class.
I’m directed to the third floor and handed a key card to give me access to the library computers, along with an index number to search. The index number is assigned to the folder containing all the successful BFA portfolios admitted in the spring term of last year. The folder should contain digital copies of each student’s work.
I navigate quickly through the tree, pausing when I see the folder containing the date I’m interested in. Inside I find another eighteen folders, each one identified only by number.
Shit. I’m going to have to go through all of them to find Chloe’s. What kind of antiquated indexing system is this?
I plow in.
Before I accepted the job here at VCU, I studied the stats on the BFA design program. Here’s how it plays out. Of the thousand or so new freshman admitted into the Art School foundations program after a high school portfolio review, only a hundred are permitted to proceed into sophomore design coursework following freshman-year portfolio review. Of those, more than ninety percent want to be design majors. They take Design 1, Typography 1, and Illustration 1, and based on that work, they submit another portfolio for review at the end of their sophomore year. Of those hundred students, an average of fifteen are admitted into the BFA program. Those are worse odds than getting into Harvard’s Medical School.
VCU is one of the toughest, most competitive design programs in the country, and popular because it’s a public school and therefore a lot more affordable than its private collage peers. The school has produced some of the finest designers and illustrators working today. It produced Guy Harvey, and as far as I’m concerned, that speaks volumes.
I open the first folder containing scans of precious sophomore work produced over hours and hours of sleepless, fraught nights. I have no idea what I expect to see. Guy talked about this place like it was Mecca, but as I scan the images in the folders, the contents of these portfolios reveal nothing more than the efforts of teenagers. Their work, like the trials of kids their age the world over, is pedantic, derivative. I look at the pieces and in a second I can tell you which working (or worse, long since passed relevant) designer or style influenced the effort. There’s little new here for me to see except the fact that these kids have access to some of the best tools in the country.
I open another folder and launch the first image.
What is this?
The composition and typography is like nothing I’ve seen. And there’s photography; pinhole work done in long exposure on a pedestrian walkway, with a single, static model—in the nude. Nice.
There’s an example of a complete re-branding for one of the biggest names in technology, and it’s better, cleaner, and even cooler than the existing one. Iconic. And then I see the tell. It’s his signature. The ligature type design he used to place randomly in text just to sign his work. A ‘g’ and an ‘h’ driven together, bound with a sensual union implying something special—promising something unexpected.
She’s got balls, using his mark like that. Then again, maybe she owns it.
This is hers. This is Chloe’s work.
It’s immaculate, and it’s altogether new. Except for that signature.
It’s so much better than every other book in her class, I don’t even know how to process it.
The girl might teach me a thing or two.
Walking back to the Harvey building I think back to my conversation with Chloe.
I told her to quit school.
I told her she didn’t have a prayer.
I don’t even know what else I
told her, because I was so distracted by the fact that a junior in college was telling me how I should behave. I was so distracted by her gray eyes, her curls, and her curves, I didn’t bother seeing the human being—the very capable human being—in front of me.
She’s good. She’s really gifted.
Now I need to figure out a way to develop her talent to its full potential without getting distracted by her other, myriad gifts. I’ve got to challenge her, require more than I demand of her peers. That’s a tall order and until I arrive in my classroom, filled with fifteen students, most eager and some dreading the upcoming semester in Typography 2, I have no idea how to do it.
I stride in to the class with my usual swagger and practiced artifice of the highest degree. The kids look like design school kids just about anywhere. There’s a contingent of preps, destined to work as art directors in big agencies, selling their souls for the almighty dollar, branding dish soap and erectile dysfunction pharmaceuticals. There are the mid-grade talents who will go on to be solid worker-bees at regional shops. They’ll spend their best years billing hours, making vast sums of money for their bosses, working eighty hour weeks, burning out before they hit forty. Some of them will have second careers in real-estate or insurance. There’s a smaller group who will make it as independent contractors, illustrating comic books, magazine covers, or going to Hollywood to do title designs and computer games. And then there’s Cloe, sitting on top of a desk at the back of the classroom. She’s either going to crash the world wide open with a brand-new approach, or crash and burn-out before anyone knows her name.
My first class of juniors are no less enamored of the fact that their professor is young. I take the same tack with them as I did my sophomores, producing my copy of the Fontbook, giving them the same assignment I gave the sophomores.
