LIFE & ART

A retrospective look at the life and work of a Philadelphia artist and teacher.

Heck has a unique artistic vision and a lifelong connection to Philadelphia’s Germantown Friends School; this memoir traces the formative influences on her personal and creative life and includes color reproductions of her artwork. The first section explores her early years. Her family came from Quaker stock, and her parents, “frantic people, driven by anxiety and impulse,” had a turbulent relationship. The author’s grandmother, Elizabeth Mellor, who lived nearby, provided a calm refuge and a sense of beauty that influenced Heck’s own aesthetic. A tragic accident that occurred in 1955, when Heck was 10, killed her baby sister and exacerbated the dysfunction between her parents. Mellor died a year later, and GFS became Heck’s haven. She was a student there for nine years. At age 15, she studied art for a year at Académie Julian in Paris, which “offered [her] a richness of life reminiscent of being in [her] grandmother’s house.” At Sarah Lawrence, she developed her “quiet” approach to art with Ansei Uchima. The second section delves into her professional life as a teacher and artist. She returned to GFS in 1971 as an instructor and taught there for four decades, leading a student art program that was both intellectually challenging and accessible. In the early 1980s, she took up oil painting again. Influences on her artwork included Egyptian, Greek, and Roman traditions, the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi, and mentors including Bob Kulicke. The final section, which presents 141 full-color plates of her paintings categorized by subject, beautifully illustrates the breadth of her work. The selections of poetry interspersed throughout the text, from Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and others, illuminate Heck’s intellectual curiosity. Her writing is expressive and thoughtful—the author effectively conveys the heartbreaking early losses and other aspects of her personal life as effectively as she does more abstract concepts of viewing and making art, visual communication, and teaching.

An insightful read about teaching, life, and art.