Artist Drives Students, and Herself, to Abstraction Palos Verdes Peninsula News
By Judith B. Herman Special to the News
On Dael Patton's last day teaching at the California Institute for Men, a hulking 6-foot-6-inch tattooed convict peered down at the petite blonde art instructor. "You're leaving here to teach junior high?" he asked. "Aren't you scared?"
No. Patton thrives on unleashing creativity in students of all ages. "Sharing someone else's creative growth is just as exciting and rewarding as experiencing my own," she says.
She has taught painting, drawing and ceramics in junior high, high school and college while pursuing her career as a painter. Though having lived on the Hill only 16 months, she is an active member of the community, teaching abstract mixed media to adults at the Palos Verdes Art Center and selling her work at the Artists' Studio Gallery at The Avenue of the Peninsula. She is featured in the forthcoming book, "Palos Verdes Peninsula Artists."
Discovering the hidden talents of the men and women prisoners she taught as part of a La Verne University program warmed her heart. She didn't think twice when a murderer invited her to her cell. The inmates were highly creative, she says. "I've got slides that would knock your socks off."
It wasn't fear but anger she felt after returning to teach junior high in 1985, 30 years after she began. The art, music and athletic programs had been decimated. "Money goes for the varsity team, but everyone else is neglected," she says. "Taxpayers should be up in arms."
She wonders whether some of the prisoners' lives might have been different if their talents had been recognized earlier. "I got a lot of recognition in school for my artistic ability," she says. "It was a wonderful compensation for being bad in math and spelling." At Fairfax High, she sang in an a capella choir and lettered in every sport. "I was small but quick."
Born in New York City in 1931, Dael arrived in Los Angeles at the tender age of 18 months after her father, a syndicated cartoonist, found work at the Disney studio. She can't remember when she first started painting, only that she brought her own supplies and accompanied her father when he went out to paint.
She specialized in art in high school and earned a teaching credential and master of arts degree in painting at Cal State Los Angeles. She married and raised two sons in West Covina, continuing to paint and teach, supporting the boys after she and their father divorced. But her art education was not complete. In fact, it never will be. Despite decades of teaching and recognition in the form of sales and awards, Patton still is growing artistically.
Starting in the 1960s, she spent summers teaching and studying at the Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts. There she met the man who became her mentor and lifelong friend, renowned printmaker and painter Harry Sternberg.
One afternoon in Idyllwild, she was absorbed in painting a forest scene when an electric storm blew in. "Harry yelled, 'Come inside; you'll be electrocuted,' but I couldn't stop painting," she recalls. The forest changed from green to blue and yellow. Patton captured the electricity on her canvas, creating the first piece she sold.
In the 1990s, she remarried and moved to Idyllwild, where galleries represented her. Since her husband's passing, she's moved to Palos Verdes to be near her son, David, and his family. Her other son, Steven, lives in Florida but stays in close contact.
Patton has won awards as an abstract painter, including Best of Show at the Palm Springs Desert Museum 2003. But it wasn't until seven years into her teaching career that she recognized the gap in her knowledge.
"As an art teacher and an artist, I wouldn't be complete without understanding abstraction. I was rather shocked that the majority of art teachers didn't understand it. In many schools how 'real' something looks is still a measure of success." She believes the overemphasis on technical skill stifles creativity and expression.
At a UCLA summer program taught by Adolph Gottlieb, a leading abstract expressionist painter, Patton wrestled with a new way of looking at art. "He wasn't really a teacher," she says, "but he was a hell of a painter," and the ideas began to gel.
Now, though she still loves to draw and paint on location, the challenge of nonobjective painting is what excites her.
"Is that the same painting you were working on 45 minutes ago?" is a question she hears often. It's hard to answer. It's the same canvas, but under every painting lurk five or six other paintings, five or six points at which she could have stopped and had a successful work. But the urge to explore, to see "what if?" keeps her brush moving over the canvas. The painting seems to be alive. The blue band on the left thickens; the top unfurls like a pennant, covering shapes beneath. Now the blue form is too close in size to the burnt orange shape on the right, which will have to change. Part of it reddens and darkens and finally splits off.
"For me, art is the constant process of exploring the unknown, letting the materials speak to you. I badger students to try it because it's a step out into the unknown and also a step into the inner self," she says. "To have someone say, 'I didn't know I had that in me,' is very rewarding. They suddenly see abstract forms in nature: cliffs, tidepools, rocks, cracks in cement. They develop a discerning eye. That's enhancing their visual world. It's extending their lives."
By Judith B. Herman Special to the News
On Dael Patton's last day teaching at the California Institute for Men, a hulking 6-foot-6-inch tattooed convict peered down at the petite blonde art instructor. "You're leaving here to teach junior high?" he asked. "Aren't you scared?"
No. Patton thrives on unleashing creativity in students of all ages. "Sharing someone else's creative growth is just as exciting and rewarding as experiencing my own," she says.
She has taught painting, drawing and ceramics in junior high, high school and college while pursuing her career as a painter. Though having lived on the Hill only 16 months, she is an active member of the community, teaching abstract mixed media to adults at the Palos Verdes Art Center and selling her work at the Artists' Studio Gallery at The Avenue of the Peninsula. She is featured in the forthcoming book, "Palos Verdes Peninsula Artists."
Discovering the hidden talents of the men and women prisoners she taught as part of a La Verne University program warmed her heart. She didn't think twice when a murderer invited her to her cell. The inmates were highly creative, she says. "I've got slides that would knock your socks off."
It wasn't fear but anger she felt after returning to teach junior high in 1985, 30 years after she began. The art, music and athletic programs had been decimated. "Money goes for the varsity team, but everyone else is neglected," she says. "Taxpayers should be up in arms."
She wonders whether some of the prisoners' lives might have been different if their talents had been recognized earlier. "I got a lot of recognition in school for my artistic ability," she says. "It was a wonderful compensation for being bad in math and spelling." At Fairfax High, she sang in an a capella choir and lettered in every sport. "I was small but quick."
Born in New York City in 1931, Dael arrived in Los Angeles at the tender age of 18 months after her father, a syndicated cartoonist, found work at the Disney studio. She can't remember when she first started painting, only that she brought her own supplies and accompanied her father when he went out to paint.
She specialized in art in high school and earned a teaching credential and master of arts degree in painting at Cal State Los Angeles. She married and raised two sons in West Covina, continuing to paint and teach, supporting the boys after she and their father divorced. But her art education was not complete. In fact, it never will be. Despite decades of teaching and recognition in the form of sales and awards, Patton still is growing artistically.
Starting in the 1960s, she spent summers teaching and studying at the Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts. There she met the man who became her mentor and lifelong friend, renowned printmaker and painter Harry Sternberg.
One afternoon in Idyllwild, she was absorbed in painting a forest scene when an electric storm blew in. "Harry yelled, 'Come inside; you'll be electrocuted,' but I couldn't stop painting," she recalls. The forest changed from green to blue and yellow. Patton captured the electricity on her canvas, creating the first piece she sold.
In the 1990s, she remarried and moved to Idyllwild, where galleries represented her. Since her husband's passing, she's moved to Palos Verdes to be near her son, David, and his family. Her other son, Steven, lives in Florida but stays in close contact.
Patton has won awards as an abstract painter, including Best of Show at the Palm Springs Desert Museum 2003. But it wasn't until seven years into her teaching career that she recognized the gap in her knowledge.
"As an art teacher and an artist, I wouldn't be complete without understanding abstraction. I was rather shocked that the majority of art teachers didn't understand it. In many schools how 'real' something looks is still a measure of success." She believes the overemphasis on technical skill stifles creativity and expression.
At a UCLA summer program taught by Adolph Gottlieb, a leading abstract expressionist painter, Patton wrestled with a new way of looking at art. "He wasn't really a teacher," she says, "but he was a hell of a painter," and the ideas began to gel.
Now, though she still loves to draw and paint on location, the challenge of nonobjective painting is what excites her.
"Is that the same painting you were working on 45 minutes ago?" is a question she hears often. It's hard to answer. It's the same canvas, but under every painting lurk five or six other paintings, five or six points at which she could have stopped and had a successful work. But the urge to explore, to see "what if?" keeps her brush moving over the canvas. The painting seems to be alive. The blue band on the left thickens; the top unfurls like a pennant, covering shapes beneath. Now the blue form is too close in size to the burnt orange shape on the right, which will have to change. Part of it reddens and darkens and finally splits off.
"For me, art is the constant process of exploring the unknown, letting the materials speak to you. I badger students to try it because it's a step out into the unknown and also a step into the inner self," she says. "To have someone say, 'I didn't know I had that in me,' is very rewarding. They suddenly see abstract forms in nature: cliffs, tidepools, rocks, cracks in cement. They develop a discerning eye. That's enhancing their visual world. It's extending their lives."