47 Years of Inspiration

Bill Parsons has been teaching art at Gow since 1975.

One of his favorite projects is the self-portrait that allows students to create art - many for the very first time. To better understand this project and

its importance, we asked Mr. Parsons to share his insights.

Ihave been doing this self-portrait project for at least twenty years. It is a somewhat simplified form of the photorealistic methods of painting that Chuck Close, a noted artist, devised after he became a quadriplegic. I was able to come up with a means where even our most basic of basic art students could create a large, impressive painting on canvas that simulated the artistic experience of creating a serious work by a professional artist. The real key to this project is not manual dexterity or natural talent but listening to the precise directions and following through as accurately as possible.

This is usually the first serious painting any of my students have created, and for some, it helps them discover their true artistic potential.

This project has evolved. For a few years, celebrity and rock star images

and other secondary faces were allowed as an inspirational source for this painting project. However, the first year we focused on self-portraits, I was amazed by how many parents made a point of taking their child’s painting off the wall during graduation weekend and proudly walking it to their car. After everyone was gone I felt that this self-portrait project had and the graduation dust began to settle, more than half the wall space with really struck student paintings was a chord in the empty. At least for me as hearts of our an art teacher, I had never childrens’ experienced such a sense of parents. success in my entire career.

I believe that this self-portrait project had really struck a chord in the hearts of our childrens’ parents.

I vowed to continue to create this authentic artistic experience for my students and thus also help them create a meaningful gift for their parents. Although it has not always been a perfect project and does not always “click” with every student, as art lessons go, it has led many of our students to explore their artistic potential. For some, this has been their first step in careers they are still pursuing today. For others that may not have chosen the rather precarious life of an artist, I have been told that even though it may be the only

Left: Joanna Scocchi (mom of PJ ’18) with his self-portrait in her Rhode Island office. Eva Norman ’22 with her self-portrait painting.

serious painting they ever did, they still treasure it. Sometimes, while standing alone in quiet reflection, they remember discovering their own as yet untapped artistic potential that they discovered so many years ago while listening to the stories told by their overly talkative old art teacher.