Sunny days in Tuscany, scrumptious Italian cuisine and weekends in Venice are three ways to describe Prof. Megan Marlatt's summer. Marlatt is going on her third year as chair of the studio art program within the art history department.
The Indianapolis-born Memphis College of Art grad spent this summer teaching painting for a University study abroad program in Castiglion Fiorentino, Italy. Marlatt and her husband, Prof. Richard Robinson of Randolph-Macon Woman's College, ran the program together. Seventeen University students, all female, took painting with Marlatt and photography with Robinson for the month-long program held in of the Tuscany region of Italy. Following an "Italian schedule," the students would break from their classes during the hot afternoon hours during the period known as siesta.
Some of the trip's highlights for Marlatt included the gelato from Rome and the bowls of pasta that the local women would cook for the students who resided in their study center. She also enjoyed the free weekends when she would travel to other parts of the country, such as the time she spent in Venice for her and her husband's 11th wedding anniversary.
Marlatt's passion for art began far before her years in art school. Being one of nine children, Marlatt said drawing was her way to stand out amidst her siblings. Marlatt contrasts herself with the students she encounters at the University, saying her students appear to be talented in several disciplines, while she specializes in drawing and painting.
"For the most part, I envy them because I was so stuck," Marlatt said. "I did this one thing and I did it very well."
Before joining the University community in 1988, Marlatt attended graduate school in New Jersey at Rutgers University, where she simultaneously worked as a sign painter.
"I didn't like the disparity between what I was doing in the studio and what I was doing on a day to day basis," Marlatt said. "One was an artistic life, and one was a generic life."
As a means to bridge both her artistic and professional life, Marlatt decided to paint murals for various community projects both in New York and New Jersey.
Upon taking her position at the University in 1988, Marlatt assumed that the students here would be similar to her peers in art school.
"A lot of times, you teach the way you've been taught," Marlatt said.
Marlatt thought that her students would naturally want to out-paint each other, but that was not the case. Instead, she said the students here are "trying to get their well-rounded Jeffersonian education."
As a result, Marlatt was forced to analyze her teaching style and adapt it to the students she was trying to reach. Teaching students how to draw without confining herself to books was her challenge as a professor.
Marlatt mentioned a saying she tries to work by: "You can learn to paint from a book as easily as you can learn to swim from a couch."
She values the process of creating art and stresses that students must feel uncomfortable and struggle through the process in order to reflect in their work.
"Students have to understand that [creating art] is not about giving you a recipe," Marlatt said. "If it was that easy to make art, then everybody would make the same art."
When Marlatt teaches, she strives for that "funny little balance of giving [her students] enough direction and pulling back and letting them get frustrated."
In her classes, Marlatt said she goes on a journey with each of her students. The difficulty for Marlatt lies in that students often struggle to deal with the lack of concrete answers to their questions along the way.
"You're teaching a physical skill that has to do with the senses by saying things verbally," Marlatt said. "It's really a visceral discipline, and you're trying to teach it cerebrally."
Besides her position here at the University, Marlatt also still competes for public art projects and was recently first alternate for a stained glass competition in Brooklyn, New York for the New York Public Art Commission. A fresco that Marlatt painted as a city project in Charlottesville at the City Hall Annex Building in 1990 still stands today.
The mother of a current third-year University student, Marlatt said she enjoys being a part of the University community. She said the University, which stresses research, allows her to stay active in her field with support, grants and time off to pursue professional outlets.
Marlatt said she enjoys all types of painting, including water color, oil acrylic, fresco and even painting on grass and asphalt.
"I'm in love with painting," Marlatt said. "It's my life calling."
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