Art Alive!

How best to capture the magic we students experienced in Sally Bartalot's art classes? In the end we realized that Sally's magic is best illustrated by her students' work, along with her lesson plans, instructions and guidelines. That is the focus of this book.

There are many ways to teach a given discipline and Sally Bartalot gives them a full spin!

Contour drawing---seeing and blind---of each other or of apples in the process of being eaten. Sumi brush skills, value studies, color mixing, negative space and perspective exercises, colored pencil techniques, shape and color analyzing, composition, puzzle drawing, paper-cut silhouettes, watercolors, oil painting, thumbnail sketches, three-dimensional approaches, and on and on. Sally Bartalot trains the mind to use the artist's tools---hands included.

My first experience of Sally's teaching was a children's class I observed as I tried to finish a still life I had started that day in her studio.

I don't remember how the still life went, but I do remember that first class I witnessed. There was such joy and concentration, and final results that were sophisticated beyond these childrens' age levels. And it all happened so naturally as the teacher talked with the children and the children with the teacher. I loved the atmosphere in that room and the freshness of the curriculum. Lucky kids! I wished I could have been one of them. Olga Miniclier, Professional Painter

What I most like about taking art with Sally Bartalot and what in the end became my major motivation for continuing and expanding, is the fact that one sees the physical material world differently after each class period. For example, after a drawing exercise, on my walk home the cracks in the sidewalk were suddenly intensely visible. I saw patterns and implicit objects I had never seen before and wanted to stop and draw them. It took me a long time to get home that day. Joyce Nielsen

I have to say, I have no idea how all this came about. I was an "only" child and took my art supplies with me everywhere. By age 13, I was an accurate pencil portrait artist and the girls all wanted pictures of their boyfriends, so I got plenty of practice!

My first art class was as a freshman at Morningside College, Sioux City, Iowa. It was William Zimmerman's "Fundamentals of Art." I had never encountered such ideas and they were so good, I use them still Also, that was the year I began drawing from the unconscious.

That was my first and only instruction until after I graduated with a degree in church music and organ from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Since then I have worked as organist/choir director in several Denver churches and synagogues.

I have taught piano since age sixteen with great enthusiasm for all ages and stages, and have also taught art and music at two of Denver's private schools.

During my twenties and thirties I sought out classes in art in the Denver area and also visited public school art departments and shows.

My earliest teachers are most revered. They are Dona Abbott, Jackie McFarland (with whom I paint every other week), Bob Ragland, Douglas Smith, and Olga Miniclier, with whom I painted very regularly in the 1980s and 1990s.

At present I continue to enjoy teaching children and adults in art and piano while pursuing my own work with Doug Dawson at the Art Students League of Denver