Like a circus rider, Melissa Klein sails along on her two horses, one foot on each steed’s back.
Klein is continually finding her balance, as artist and businesswoman, teacher and learner. Life is about work and more work — but then she is in fact a horsewoman, owner of two Percherons who make sure she comes home after her long days at Lincoln High School. More on them later.
A teacher at Port Angeles’ alternative high school since 2005, Klein’s mission is to show her students that yes, they are artists by nature — and that the skills they learn in her art classes have real-world applications.
This coming weekend, Klein and a crew of teenage artists will open up a studio, a place for play and exploration called the Art Factory. It’s part of the Art Shack, a new facet of the Juan de Fuca Festival at the Vern Burton Community Center, and it’s open to people with a lot, a little or no experience making art.
Open from 1 p.m. till 3 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, the Art Factory will be a drop-in venue with work stations for mixing and matching, Klein promises.
As an art teacher Klein is, in the words of her 15-year-old student Josh Ellis, “pretty awesome.” She helps her pupils navigate the territories of color, form and self-revelation, and “she knows what she’s talking about,” he added.
The artist and teacher’s work can be seen across the region and beyond: Klein has had exhibitions at Studio Bob in downtown Port Angeles, at Lehani’s in Port Townsend, at the Art Institute of Seattle and on the Hawaiian island of Kauai. Perhaps her most prominent effort is Fish on the Fence, the public art installation she helped create on Port Angeles’ waterfront.
Back in 2009 Klein taught her Lincoln students how to build sharks, salmon and other seagoing creatures out of plywood and paint, and then had those affixed to the fence outside The Landing mall at the intersection of Lincoln Street and Railroad Avenue.
In the years since, Fish on the Fence has expanded, as community members come to various festivals to paint more fish figures to be added to the display; an annual Fish on the Fence banquet raises funds for the Arthur D. Feiro Marine Life Center on City Pier.
To Klein, art — in classes, displays and festivals — acts as a catalyst. It brings people together to learn about one another, about their surroundings and about themselves.
Inside the Art Factory, she means to provide a safe place for wading, as it were. She’ll set up stations where people can explore color, silhouette images and contour drawing, a technique Klein is especially excited about.
In this practice, the artist regards the subject and puts pencil to paper — and does not look at what’s happening on the paper.
“It really slams you into that right-brain thinking,” she says. “I call it cross-training for the brain,” in counterpoint to frequent use of the logical, verbal left brain hemisphere.
Contour drawing, and the rest of the Art Factory for that matter, are about enjoying process and practice — and letting go of thoughts of perfection.
Perfectionism can be poison, after all. Klein has seen people using their desire for it as an excuse to do nothing.
Fortunately, Klein also has seen people transform in the space of an art class.
They come in tense, since a parent, a sibling or even a teacher told them they were no good at art. Yet, “they really want to do this, but they don’t know where to begin.”
First off, Klein provides an environment where there are guidelines but also room to roam. She’s heard about grade-school art classes in which kids are given paint and brushes and then told to imitate the old masters.
“That kind of horrified me,” she said. “To me, learning to do art is about learning to be the best artist you can be.”
So she stands back, and when the student is ready, “it is magical: watching them take a chance, and then come out the other side.”
They are changing that old, tired story of “I’m not creative.”
Next weekend at the festival, a crew of Klein’s students from Lincoln High — Team Art Factory — will join her to welcome those who stop in.
Timia Fortman and Stefanie Boyd, both 17; Grace Blaylock, Brandy Swan and Kylee Casy, all 16; Destani Martin, 14; and Marci Quezada, 18, will staff the art stations and, Klein said, polish some of their own skills in the process. These include business skills such as interacting with the public.
Klein is clearly proud of the team, whose members have been staying in her classroom at lunch time to prepare for Art Factory weekend. This summer Klein will take things a step further with a new course, Art Entrepreneur Boot Camp for high school students.
From June 25 through July 13, participants will learn how to create and market their art, using the Internet and other venues.
Beginners are welcome in the course, which will be offered at the North Olympic Peninsula Skills Center, 905 W. Ninth St.
For information and a registration form visit www.NOPSC.org and use the Forms menu and Summer School link, or phone 360-565-1533.
At the same time, Klein herself is in the process of a major project: balancing her own life as an educator and an artist-entrepreneur. She went from full time at Lincoln High School to part time last fall, and wants to devote more time to working in her home studio off Lost Mountain Road.
Klein grew up in Philadelphia, earned her bachelor’s in fine art at the University of Pennsylvania and got into teaching when she was asked to teach art at a halfway house for mentally ill people in Philadelphia.
It was also in that city that Klein met Henry Paterson, the man who would become her husband. They worked together at a bronze foundry, and were together about four years before they married.
Klein then found work as a teacher on Kauai, and earned her master’s of initial teaching, with an endorsement in special education, from Gonzaga University in a cohort program.
Kauai was lovely, but Klein was ready to return to the mainland, where her family lives. Her aunt and uncle, Anne and Terry Grasteit, are residents of Sequim, and Klein enjoyed a two-person show at Studio Bob with Terry, an abstract painter, in 2008.
After nearly seven years here, the Olympic Peninsula still feels right, Klein says.
“I thrive in a rural area. I need the room,” she adds. “I have always found nature to be healing.”
The move here also allowed Klein to fulfill a long-held dream of owning a horse — two, it turned out. Through a draft-horse rescue program, she adopted April, a pregnant Percheron, in 2006. Six weeks later, April gave birth to a colt Klein named Hawthorne, after the novelist Nathaniel.
Caring for these enormous animals has become a balm, a balancing agent that prevents her from working all the time.
The horses have found their way into her art, naturally. They’ve also led the way into a new outlook.
It wasn’t as if owning two horses was the prudent thing to do, Klein says. But she was ready to quit “playing by the rules,” as she puts it. She had been a “good girl” all her life — and then it came time to go after what she wanted, and not what those rules dictated.
Through all of this, Klein wanted to develop herself as an artist, and act on the things she was teaching her students about entrepreneurship.
She refocused her efforts on getting her work into more venues — including Harbinger Winery west of Port Angeles, where she has art on display all summer — and has found new clients. Harbinger winemaker Sara Gagnon, for one, chose a Klein painting for the label of her soon-to-be-released 2009 Sangiovese.
Also this spring, Klein is working with Jim Waddell, a consultant facilitating a community visioning process in Neah Bay. The Environmental Protection Agency funds visioning workshops in towns across the country, and artists’ renderings of the residents’ ideas are a key element.
In addition, Klein looked around for some fresh education and enrolled in an online course with Grammy-nominated musician and entrepreneur coach Christine Kane (ChristineKane.com).
“Some of her stories about being in the music business make anything else you can do seem like a cakewalk,” Klein says. “She managed to be successful at it by creating a new path for herself instead of following all of the ‘standard advice.’
“I had been following her newsletter for a couple of years, and last year felt really stuck. She was offering an online ‘Uplevel Your Business’ class, and I decided to take it, even though it was a significant investment both time- and money-wise.”
The course has become a cornerstone in Klein’s life. She learned ways to market her art in an authentic way, and she joined a community of entrepreneurs that has helped her stay on track.
“Many times when I want to chicken out or hide under the covers, well, I can’t, because I promised my accountability partner, Lailey Jenkins [a therapist and career coach] that I would get ‘x,y,z’ done.”
Klein has also given self-care a higher position on her priorities list. She sees acupuncturist Kathryn Cooper a few times a month, and finds that the treatments boost her energy, help her sleep well and reduce her coffee thirst.
As a working artist — and as a woman who pays attention to overall health — Klein hopes to offer more to her students.
“Being an artist challenges a lot of paradigms,” especially if you’re a woman, she adds.
“You’re calling attention to yourself,” and when you unveil your art, you’re revealing an intensely personal thing.
At 44, Klein has come into her own. As an artist and an educator, she stands for courage and confidence.
“When I was in my 20s, I thought, ‘I’m not ready’” to really get out there. Then it was “I’m only in my 30s. I’m not ready.”
When she hit 40, there was a moment when she thought, “I’m too old.”
Happily, that did not last. Klein tossed out the “old” thinking and kept moving forward. These days, her modus operandi can be summed up in three words.
