T
abor Academy has a strong Fine Arts Tradition which began with the appointment of it’s first full time Art Instructor Lucien O. Lavoie in 1954. I was one of his many students. Graduating in 1976, I embarked on a degree in Art Education and began my 30-year career in this field. It was not until 1987 when a second studio was built and staffed with a second art instructor Kim Pratt who taught ceramics and glass in this new facility until 1990. I was hired as her replacement and worked with Lucien Lavoie until his retirement when I assumed the role of department chair. From 1954 until present where there have been 11 Visual Arts Instructor at Tabor Academy and the Visual Arts program has grown from one to five full time faculty. It was Lucien’s influence that led me to art school, art education and a twenty-five year career in the arts. I knew from an early age that what he had done for me was important and worthy of my dedicating my life to as he had. Lucien was one of the greatest alchemists of our time, not turning lead into gold but boys into men and girls into women. Men and women who knew something of the beauty of art, nature, and life itself. Lucien had not only a deep love and understanding of the visual arts but all the arts: dance, poetry, literature, philosophy and music, all kinds of music. He would play music in the studio from around the world often sung in foreign languages. It was the rhythms and tempos that he wished us to become sensitive to, and he encouraged us to listen to the spaces between the notes and value them for their silence and understand the importance of their place. As an avid reader, philosopher and poet himself, he would hang large banners done in beautiful calligraphy in the hallways of the academic center for all who passed by to read and contemplate. Lucien Lavoie taught many people many things. To some he was simply that crazy, cosmic, bearded old man on the mountain. For many of us, he was the mountain; the mountain on which we learned to stand and witness the beauty of life.
On the Jersey Turnpike The double cordon of semis and cars Shimmers in mid-day August: A sluggish, metallic serpent Inching toward a distant wreck. Strapped in, Held between twitching impatience & a yearning to beam up. Beyond our narrow prison A swath of grazing pasture Runs to the tree-line Where a tidy farmhouse nestles; On the porch – A young girl, Blowing bubbles— Within their spiraling membranes Stabs of Splintered chrome.