at the Katrina School of Art
by Shannon O’Hearn Downing
Published in Homeschooling Today January/February 2008
As I crossed the lawn, I noticed a group huddled before the two car garage. They sat in camping chairs, clutching colored pencils and sketch pads and cups of steaming coffee. Overhead, birds the size of duck eggs darted from garage eaves to the yard and back, gathering dirt for their mud houses. Two farm cats crouched in the grass, tails twitching.
These students who were to become friends over the week ahead gave me a warm, sleepy hello. The sun rises early on the farm in July; it was not yet seven. Their eyes lifted to the birds, to the mud houses, to the slope of the garage roof, then lowered to their drawings, pencils moving as deftly as the birds they watched.
Such huddled, quiet sketching became the thread that tied together the next six days. Only six days. I wanted to breathe it in and make it mine. The big Montana sky, the roseate mountains, the cows calling from the valley below, the frenetic chatter of cliff swallows whose portraits would become a symbol of our time here, the smell of tilled earth and perked coffee, tractor oil and turkey sausage, wheat fields and pencil shavings.
Our host announced breakfast, so we collected our things and headed toward the house. I glanced back at the garage and noticed a particularly round bird perched on her teacup-shaped nest. She fluffed her feathers and settled in like a grandma on her front porch, watching me watch her.
Inside Russ and Loraine Wahl’s farmhouse, art students gathered around the tables, held hands, prayed, and praised God. In the kitchen, tea and cream and thick, golden honey beckoned from the stove. My daughter Clare and I grabbed mugs and bowls and lined up for what was to become our favorite meal each day.
Loraine spent the entire year preparing for us. In addition to overseeing every detail of the school, each morning she shared homemade wheat bread, granola, and Montana oats. There was also fresh fruit, dried coconut, and trail mix. Some breakfasts surprised us with sausage links, berry muffins, and warm, fresh duck eggs. We single-filed through Loraine’s bounty, filled our plates, and found a place at the tables.
Mountain air made me voracious. More likely, it was Loraine’s home cooking. Except for a hot roast beef lunch at the Hutterite Colony and a chili and fry bread dinner at the Blackfeet Reservation, she prepared three meals a day for us for six straight days. We took our big meals at noon, and they were delicious: deep dishes of chicken and beef and noodles and vegetables, and family favorites like homemade apple sauce, frozen fruit compote, and sweet wheat berry salad. Loraine Wahl loved us a thousand different ways, but she loved us best with her food.
I could have lingered in that sunny room an hour after the last granola and buttered wheat toast was served, refilling my cup, eavesdropping. But farmers are punctual, this was an advanced art school, and we followed The Schedule.
So, we carried our dishes to the sink. grabbed our tote bags, and headed for the garage Russ had converted to an art studio. We stepped down into the cool room. Classical music rose from the portable stereo, pillar candles in Mason jars cheered the weak morning light, cliff swallows chattered on the other side of the garage door.
Each student found gifts from the instructors, Barry and Saundra Stebbing: new journal, sketch pad, colored and drawing pencils, a fine black journal marker, and the syllabus for the day written in Mr. Stebbing’s inimitable hand. Clare and I claimed seats near the front and ran our hands over these treasures.
Mr. Stebbing is a seasoned artist and teacher. His standards are high and his manner is unpretentious. Hе delivers masterful fine arts instruction in a systematic clip next to an easel in the front of the room, and his is the rare gift of one who can coax improvement from any student, whether the advanced oil painter or the hand-turkey artist. Mrs. Stebbing is his Proverbs 31 wife, for as his capable and noble helpmeet, she floats the room dispensing dabs of paint, freshening still life flowers, encouraging the discouraged. Her work makes his possible, and together, they are a wonder to behold.
Their life’s work is a consecration. Barry and Saundra’s devotion to Christ permeates their insights and flows into their speech, their instruction, and their relationships. The Stebbings’ intention to “establish holy guidelines in the fine arts,” coupled with Barry’s instructional zeal, non-placative honesty, and artistic excellence, fulfilled my dreams for art instruction for my family, and is what drew Clare and me to Cut Bank, Montana.
Mr. Stebbing opens every class with prayer. The Katrina School of Art, Class of 2007, had begun. We bowed our heads.
Our first three days were studio days filled with instruction, practice, and homework. Mr. Stebbing taught drawing fundamentals; one-and two-point perspective; gesture sketching; journal keeping; portraiture; color theory; acrylic, watercolor and oil painting. The next three days were field days spent applying our learning.
Our instructor proved a remarkable guide. On the Blackfeet Reservation, several students tried sketching Henry Bear Medicine. People naturally stiffen when being drawn, and this ancient, wizened man suggested we take his photograph instead as this would save a lot of work. When Barry Stebbing wandered over, his warm, mustachioed smile and endearing personality instantly put Henry Bear Medicine at ease, and the old Indian sat chatting for a long while. Mr. Stebbing did just as well at the Hutterite Colony, and before long those shy, cloistered girls giggled and offered him ice cream sandwiches.
Mr. Stebbing advocates working en plein-air, or out-of-doors. Reflecting on his experience “painting the back roads of America” for his aptly titled coffee table book, Painting America, he explains:
The inspiration I was receiving from God, along with the revelations from being steeped within the confines of His creation… would carry me over the mountains and through the valleys. (The Student’s Guide to Keeping an Art Journal, How Great Thou Art Publications, 1995.)
This plein-air scholar immersed us in God’s creation. We climbed and sketched the hoodoo mounds of Writing-OnStone Park in Alberta, Canada. We sat and sketched the Rocky Mountain skyline in Glacier National Park. We stood and sketched the abandoned farmsteads, rusting trucks, and cranky roosters of rural Montana. Some of the best of us walked up Wahl’s hill before dawn and painted the sun rising over the Rockies.
Always, there was an assignment, а challenge, a reminder to keep up with the journals. The pace was exhausting, and oil painting bested me, but other than satisfying Loraine’s requirements for tidiness and kitchen duty, the only demand on Clare and me was sharing our love of art.
Katrina Suzanne Wahl, for whom the summer session is named, was a quiet presence in the school. Her oil painted apples and silver bowls rested on the entrance wall. Cassette recordings of her piano recitals floated from the kitchen stereo. One of her poems lay on the piano bench beside bursting memory albums labeled Katrina 1, Katrina 2, Katrina 3.
On Sunday after supper, we assembled in the Wahls’ family room to learn more about their middle child. We watched bits of family videos. We saw her pretty face and smile, her long brown hair. We heard her voice. There she was in these rooms where we now sat, playing with her sisters whom we had met.
We came to know Katrina as a young woman of superlative talent in a family bound by love and by Christ. Her life was ordered excellence, and she showed her aversion to discord in the final stanzas of “They Call it Art,” a poem she wrote when fifteen:
Slowly their art grew less beautiful.
The essence of art changed.
They didn’t paint so lifelike anymore;
It was flat and disarranged.Now there are squiggles and dots,
with bright shapes nearby and thrown in.
It doesn’t make sense;
It’s smeared and it’s Meaningless.
Like some for whom excellence comes easily, a private weakness devastated her. A food allergy became an eating disorder which became Katrina’s despair. In the spring of her freshman year of college, she expressed a hopelessness which alarmed her parents, and Loraine immediately left Montana for the university. While there, Loraine found an off-campus biblical counselor for Katrina, spent the week with her daughter, and returned to the farm concerned for her fit in this university, but hopeful for Katrina’s health.
The freshman year ended. Katrina flew to the Philippines on a summer missions trip and after a good visit home, returned to college. Once there, she realized the progress she had made with the counselor was neither fast nor complete enough, and her secret struggle resumed. Unused to failure, Katrina immersed herself in her studies, and battled her shame alone.
Her parents’ apprehensions about the university grew, and they began looking for another school. But before they could find a truly Christian college and suggest a transfer, in October of her sophomore year, Russ and Loraine’s daughter died. Katrina Suzanne Wahl had taken her own life.
Russ spoke tenderly of Clare and I sat listening on their floor, me hugging my knees, marveling at his steadfast faith. I looked at my daughter-so like Katrina in some ways, concerned for her understanding, unsure of God’s purposes in all of this. Katrina.
Russ then spoke words which will never leave me. He said, “I know Katrina better now than when she was alive.”
When the Wahls settled Katrina into her dormitory room, they expected their carefully chosen Christian university to advance her understanding of art, music, and Christ. What they found after her death was a godlessness assigned to her study.
In his course description, one instructor states:
The student must be prepared to enter quite actively and deliberately into the process of experiencing works of visual, dramatic, and cinematic art… this course requires careful and skillful looking and listening a willingness to engage a work repeatedly… and a willingness to search within oneself to see how the self responds to art works. The course is about art as experience.
In the works he assigned, this instructor required his students to exреrience (emphasis his) themes of rapе, hopelessness, temptation, despair, and suicide without offering in his six-page-long syllabus and course outline a single reference to God, sin, redemption, hope, or Christ.
Though she covered the surfaces of her room and her mind with Scripture, Russ and Loraine believe that, in her weakened condition, Katrina’s perfectionist learning style enabled these ungodly “art works” to saturate her thinking, crowd out Christ, and open her eyes to darkness. to her study.
The Stebbings’ office assistant, Linda, received an unusual phone call one day. A mother of five homeschooled children, all of them now grown, called to order materials for a friend and to express her appreciation for the curriculum. She had purchased Barry’s How Great Thou Art video series for her third child, whose art blossomed under his tutelage. This daughter entered college co-majoring in music and art, and aspired to illustrate children’s books.
Linda’s sweet spirit led the caller, Loraíne, to share her story of Katrina Suzanne Wahl. Afterward and without explanation, Linda urged Mr. Stebbing to call Loraine. He phoned the very next day, and they spoke long moments about Katrina, a parent’s grief, and “Christian” colleges. He ended their discussion with a powerful prayer.
One early morning a month later, Barry and Saundra called Russ and Loraine eager to share an inspiration. Loraine writes in her introductory letter for the school that Mr. Stebbing
…enthusiastically introduced the idea of an advanced art school as a wholesome, God-honoring alternative to the often secular, sometimes immoral, art courses offered by even the more conservative colleges. We agreed in our desire to offer young people a place of instruction that would encourage artists to see and accurately portray life as it really is-a beautiful gift from God.
And so, from one family’s tragedy and the lovingkindness of another, The Katrina School of Art was born.
Where I live, summer camps are popular and parents are curious about a week-long art school in Montana. I find it is easy to tell about the Stebbings instruction, and easier still to tell about the field trips, but explaining how Montana wheat farmers came to host such a thing is a hard story to tell.
The school is grief mobilized for good, but to explain this is difficult. It is shocking to hear someone has taken her life. If a homeschooled, churched, believing young woman goes to college and dies by her own hand, logic follows that mine could, too.
In the week spent with Russ and Loraine Wahl, I rode hours hither and yon in their vans, I listened in on their conversations, I worshiped with them, met their friends, their daughters, their sons-in-law, I loved on their grandbabies. I know Katrina was cherished, churched, disciplined, nourished, trained, and beloved of this family. Yet, despite the Wahls doing all the right things, their child ended her life.
The Great Commission calls us to go into the world and proclaim Christ. If we obey this command and speak His Truth, the world will draw us into a discussion of its relative truth. As homeschooling parents, we prepare our children to be pulled by the world; we equip them for battle.
In the college setting, where teenagers are newly separated from the grounded security of home and church, this burden is profound. Christian college professors are remiss if they invite secular humanism into their classroom instruction and fail to bring every discussion, every assignment back to the Bible, to teach their students to take their thoughts and feelings captive and hold them before Christ’s teaching. Oswald Chambers states:
If you do not obey the light, it will turn into darkness. ‘If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!”… Continually bring the truth out into actuality; work it out in every domain, or the very light you have will prove a curse. (My Utmost for His Highest, 1935; reprinted, Barbour and Company, Inc., 1992.)
By engaging our children in intentional, age-appropriate discussions of that which creeps into our homes and universities, we equip them to shoot holes of light into this world’s darkness. We must teach them to pray,
O Lord, The world is artful to entrap, approaches in fascinating guise, extends many a gilded bait, presents many a charming face. Let my faith scan every painted bauble, and escape every bewitching snare in a victory that overcomes all things. (The Valley of Vision, edited by Arthur Bennett, The Banner of Truth Trust, 1975.)
Clare and I crossed the gravel driveway to the van, our shoulders burdened with travel bags and leave-taking. We loaded our luggage and turned for one last look at the mountains, the grain bins, the wheat fields.
My eyes returned to the two-car garage before which this group huddled six days ago, and searched for one particularly round bird I met that first morning here. I found her, though she was hard to see, for her porch had become a well-built dome, with an opening high in front just large enough for her to pass through. I wondered at God’s provision for the least of His creatures and how so much had changed for her in such a short time.
Then I smiled, stepped into the van, and wondered the same for my daughter, my new friends, and myself, all Katrina School ofArt students who had watched her watching us.