She drove a white, 1966, split window Volkswagon pop-top camper, with rusted out wheel wells, and numerous stickers from the many places it had been pasted all over the bumpers and across the rear engine compartment. It was the fall of 1992 and Carol Jean had just comeback from what she said was her last trip to Mexico. The bus had broken down in Tijuana and had been repaired with duct tape and a numerous assortment of metal cans and bailing wire.

    Her full name was Carol Jean Bertch and to say she was outrageous was putting it mildly. It was my first semester in art school and I wasn’t sure why she was there, other than to hang out and tell us stories about Mexico. She wasn’t in any of my classes and wasn’t a teacher as far as I knew.

   As the semester went on her story telling stopped and she was usually in the painting studio working. Being a first year student I didn’t know about mixed media, which is the medium Carol Jean worked in, but after seeing what she did I knew that was the direction I was headed.

   There was a canvas so large it required two easels to secure it as she worked. Some areas had been painted, some not, some had large pieces from old posters and billboards pasted to them, and then there were the prints she had done, the photographs she had taken and the ceramic jewelry she made hanging from other areas. I was fascinated and asked Carol Jean questions about her work, which she answered and told me she was the artist in residence.

   In the first few weeks of my painting class we had learned some basic color theory and how to use light and shadows. It was now time for us to do a painting of our own, but before we began my professor, Nancy Klapp, introduced the class to Carol Jean and spoke of all of Carol Jean’s accomplishments, including having work in the collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art,

   But the Carol Jean who walked through our class looking and commenting on each students work was no longer this gypsy like magical person who made us laugh with her story telling. No, now she was a teacher and very critical of what she was seeing in our initial efforts of trying to paint. 

   When she walked by me and stopped to see what I was doing, I pretended I didn’t see her, but hear her I did: “Don’t put that in the center! Use the entire canvas. Let your painting lead the viewer’s eye to the other things you want to include. Don’t line then up like soldiers! And clean those brushes!”

   I still have that painting and it hangs in a prominent place in my home. And those brushes I still have them too and wrote this poem a few years ago when Carol Jean died.

Remembering Carol Jean

I remember little things

like dirty paint brushes

colored with the memory

of the hue last applied.

The smell of paint thinner

escaping from their bristles.

“You need to clean those,”

“Hot water and soap,”

a mixture I thought would fail.

A jar of old paint brushes

still clean after years of use,

I remember Carole Jean.