VENTURA HIGH SCHOOL : Casting Class Makes a Positive Impression

When Patti Post started teaching art at Ventura High School eight years ago, she says, she already knew that “there were things that I wanted to do, and there wasn’t money for them.” She decided to do them anyway, with the help of state grants or any other money she could find, even out of her own pocket.

“My husband has me on a budget,” she confesses. “I was spending about $1,000 a year on school. . . . I still am.”

Post, 44, earlier this year received one of two BRAVO Awards given by the Music Center of Los Angeles County in recognition of excellence in teaching the arts. But most of her attention in recent weeks has been focused on the plaster cast project in her advanced placement studio art class.

It’s a five-panel wall frieze, 8 feet by 20 feet, devised by the students and made up in part of casts made from their own clothed bodies. The theme, which advances through each panel, is “the hero’s journey through human history.” It is a topic that allows Post and her students to consider, among other things, how artists have represented humankind through history, how Michelangelo plotted large-scale projects such as the Sistine Chapel, and how Plato used the analogy of shadows on a cave wall to explain how we conceive art and communicate with each other.

“It’s an opportunity to integrate literature and history into the artistic process,” Post says. “It’s critical that we not just keep it exciting, but keep it valid.”

The wall is made of gauze and plaster--the same gauze and plaster doctors use to immobilize broken bones--and beneath the surface, some castoff clothes. Post bought the gauze and plaster from a physicians’ supplier, not an art store, and estimates the budget for the whole project at about $450.

Her overall budget for four arts classes, she says, is probably $2,500 to $3,000--”four to five times” as much as the school district provides. Then there are the fees for the advanced placement test her top students must take in order to have a chance at college credit for their work--about $100 a head.

To help meet those expenses, most of Post’s art students pay $13 a year for materials (the fees are waived for those who can’t afford them).

The school stages an annual spring madonnari chalk-art festival that has netted as much as $600 in sponsorships from school staff and local businesses.

Last weekend, art teachers arranged a work-a-thon in which students labored up to six hours on campus beautification projects, having recruited community sponsors to contribute by the hour. Students were free to direct the money toward the art project of their choice.

And now, Post reports, caricaturist Chris Martinez, whose son Randy is a Ventura High student, has volunteered to donate an evening’s sketching to bring in money for the program.

“I don’t ask for money from anybody else’s budget,” Post says. “I decided a long time ago to take what the school district gives me and work very hard to make that as much as it can be.”

(Post and her students are inviting the public to the unveiling of their wall frieze on campus Dec. 13 at 5:30 p.m., shortly before the curtain rises on the drama department’s fall presentation.)