I had come from a small liberal all girls' Catholic high school in Burbank, that was academically rigorous and also encouraged creativity: some of us started up a literary magazine, and tried our hand at making super 8 films, and in one religious studies class we read and illustrated the Tao Te Ch'ing. I had free rein in the art room, making paintings, books, stage sets, and murals. Both of my parents had been in the music business, and though neither of them were versed in the visual arts, they supported my interests. My father used to tell me, 'I don't know much about art, baby, but you've got rhythm." Making things was always a part of my daily life.
I attended UCSB in 1969, receiving California State and Regents scholarships. I tried one art class at UCSB in which I never even met the instructor, only the TA, and he was engaged in making enormous hard-edged paintings of matchbook covers, while I was reading Yeats and Blake -- I felt hopelessly out of tune and vowed never to take an art class again. Instead I wrote and drew my way through classes in Literature, Art History, Spanish, Philosophy and Religious Studies, making my choices based on wandering the aisles of the UCSB bookstore and seeing what the professors were assigning as reading material. If it interested me, I either took their classes or sat in on them. Somehow I managed to enjoy several upper division courses but, in two years, had not taken any General Ed requirements. The thought of spending the next two years in crowded lecture halls, fulfilling these 'requirements' seemed awful and so I applied to the Education Abroad program, eager to postpone this fate by traveling to Spain. I also applied to College of Creative Studies. When CCS accepted me for Fall 1971, I leapt at the opportunity. Instead of spending a full year abroad, I went to Palma de Mallorca, Spain on my own to teach and then to North Africa (to meet up with my future husband who was bound for Tunisia to teach in the Peace Corps) for only a summer.
I had learned about the College through Max Schott, whom I met with a group of friends Greek folk dancing on Sundays on the grassy palm shaded lawns bordering Cabrillo Blvd. Max knew I drew and painted -- I had shown him some of the small illustrated 'books' I made either in lieu of or in addition to required papers for other classes. I had sat in on some of his classes, enjoying the give-and-take informality. At his suggestion I applied to CCS, showing my portfolio to Marvin Mudrick and Gerry Haggerty. I can still hear Gerry's soft voice talking passionately about the history of art while clicking through carousels of slides, or popping in the print room well after midnight when a few of us were still working.
I was given my own studio space -- which before this time had been a kitchen table, shared with countless roommates. That alone changed the way I approached my work. I could leave things and pick up the next day, so work suddenly had a continuity like never before. I liked working in solitude and found that by changing my sleeping habits, I could enjoy the studio alone and uninterrupted. I woke at 3am every morning, walked by way of the lagoon to the barracks -- the old College - and painted until 9am. When most of the students showed up I'd go outside to nap under the large sycamore tree. In the afternoons I took a swim in the ocean, showered on campus, then either went to class, hitchhiked into Santa Barbara to my waitress job or walked back to Isla Vista to sell tofu and carrot juice to surfers and hippies at my job at Sun and Earth Natural Foods.
I tried painting from my summer abroad notebooks filled with sketches and notations and from memories that ranged from turquoise waters of Dey? to the souks of Qairouan. I was struggling with how to visually express the world that was opening up for me at age nineteen. Most of those paintings went promptly into the BFI Collection (aka the trash). But finding a voice is always built upon layers of false starts. I bumped up against my limitations of rendering in a literal way, and while realizing that experiences were more than just a necklace of events, I tried my hand at both representation and abstraction. One teacher, Paul Wonner, used the poetry of association -- objects tellingly placed on tabletops -- to evoke a memory or mood. I learned in part through imitation, from Paul and other teachers. Since CCS was committed to bringing quality instructors who were actively engaged in their discipline -- so critical to a young person soaking influences up like fresh bread -- my sources were genuine. I turned also to the desert landscape of the American Southwest -- and the art of Georgia O'Keeffe. Abstractions of bones, shapes of landforms, colors of the earth, cave paintings, and maps of ancient American sites, started to emerge in my work.
In 1972 I married Steve Craig, who had left the Peace Corps, enrolled at UC Irvine in Writing and then after a year, was accepted into UCSB's PhD program in Archaeology. We were bent on saving money to buy land in the Southwest and so we decided to live in the back of a '64 Chevy Nova station wagon, which we bought fro $400.00 and parked on El Nido Street in a lot owned by an old codger named Kit Carson. Three other CCS students lived there, Richard in a tree house, Brian in a shed and Lynn in a dollhouse. It was the 70's after all. I cooked amazing meals in an electric pan atop an orange crate assemblage in my studio at CCS. On rainy nights I often "worked late".
I was blessed to be in school with other students who loved to think and to make things and to share. The studios were humming with people at all hours. Visiting artists such as Masami Kanemitsu, Paul Wonner, Alice Baber, Doug Edge, Bob Marks, taught painting, sculpture, photography. Other artists, such as pianist Michael Rogers, Susan Farrell and other members of the New York City Ballet summered here. When the illustrious writer and translator Kenneth Rexroth's job was threatened in the English Department poets Alan Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure and came to rally round their friend, and were all hosted by the College. Students casually sat on the lawn and talked with the poets, or tiptoed into the Old Little Theatre to hear Michael rehearse. It was a magical time.
CCS encouraged work, hard work. No one wanted to just 'get by'. Its atmosphere was charged with the utter joy of making, trying new ways, listening to Coltrane or Cohen, writing on paintings, painting over poems, drawing new lines with a welding torch or an HB pencil. Beatrice Sweeney taught "walking Biology" and another professor taught "Physics for Poets" to a motley crew of curious students. Max continued to hold his intimate discussions of Chekhov and Dostoyevsky, and could always be found after hours at the Playa Azul caf? or the Copper Coffeepot downtown working quietly on his own books.
We moved from the car to an apartment with 4-8 other CCS students (depending), and then to a trailer near Sun and Earth. In 1973 I had my graduating exhibition with fellow CCS artist Lise Apatoff. I was pregnant and Lise promised to be the child's godmother. What more could I want? I'd name her Sienna -- color of the earth -- after the abstract landscapes I was painting from the canyons de Chelly and Chaco.
I continue to work at my craft every day, a habit nurtured by the self-directed approach encouraged at CCS. I moved from makeshift bedroom studios in Isla Vista until I returned to UCSB for my MFA (with William Dole as my mentor) and was given a studio on West Campus where I painted while Sienna attended day care down the path. Later I converted spaces in downtown Santa Barbara and Goleta into studios, taught grades K-6 through the Children's Creative Project, and taught at SB City College and also at UCSB. Through teaching and gallery sales I supported my daughter and maintained my studio. In 1980 I moved to a studio in the old Adult Education buildings, now part of Presidio Park, where I have had the good fortune to work to this day.
In 1989, after 8 years as a single parent, I married Macduff Everton, also a graduate of CCS ('80). His anthropological work with the Maya in the Yucat?n, and his panoramic photography, that has him chasing the light around the globe, has been an inspiration and has allowed me to travel and work directly from those experiences, making paintings and artist's books. My daughter, now 29, lives in Oxford, Lhasa, and Kathmandu. She is a published writer with a pending PhD in Anthropology from Cornell University. While still in high school she too took a class from Max at the College. They both shared a love of horses and of language. His gentle inquisitiveness encouraged her to follow her dreams just as he had encouraged me thirty years ago.
If you'd like to know more about Mary Heebner you can visit her website:
http://www.maryheebner.com/
