Studios, Schools: 2-Way Streets : JUDIE BAMBER / UC IRVINE

Why do many artists teach? Mostly because only the superstars make a comfortable living selling their work. But some artists prefer to do graphic design, build packing crates or work at administrative jobs. Presumably those who opt for the classroom view their occupation as more emotionally and mentally rewarding than other types of employment.

Are there moments of synchronicity between life in the classroom and life in the studio? Do conscientious teachers slight their artwork or find shortcuts that yield less venturesome results? We posed such questions to three intensely committed artists at different stages in their careers and with varying degrees of pedagogical involvement. Their comments reveal both a deep ambivalence about teaching and a recognition of its hard-won moments of insight and personal satisfaction.

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UC Irvine visiting faculty member Judie Bamber, 36, is a CalArts graduate whose exquisite little paintings of sexually tinged objects--maraschino cherries, mussels, women’s sexual organs--vaulted her into the first tier of up-and-coming Los Angeles artists in the early ‘90s.

For a couple of years she has been painting watercolors based on old photographs of her father, who died young--images that conjure a sense of psychological distance and loss. Shown at Richard Telles Fine Art, Bamber’s Los Angeles gallery, these pieces also have been well-received by critics. She has been in high-profile group shows at such venues as UCLA’s Wight Art Gallery; the University Art Museum, Berkeley; and the Armand Hammer Museum of Art in Los Angeles.

Bamber, who moved to New York a couple of years ago, also has taught at UCLA and Cal State Los Angeles. This year, her fifth as a UCI part-timer, she was on campus two days a week to teach two undergraduate classes and oversee grad students’ independent studies projects. Between classes, she made herself available to students and planned classes.

“My work takes a lot of time,” she said. “It’s very slow, very painstaking. But two days a week is not too bad to have to be away from it and be doing something else.”

Bamber, who also has done freelance designing, conceded that nonteaching jobs “have the advantage of not being related to your work and not . . . being as intellectually draining. But they tend to be more time-consuming and more physically draining, so it’s a bit of a trade-off.”

For an artist who necessarily spends much time alone in her studio, teaching involves welcome interaction, Bamber said. “It’s nice to know there are going to be a couple days a week when I have to go someplace and deal with people and talk about ideas.”

Teaching also has been a learning experience, she said, even on a purely technical level. As an undergraduate at the conceptually oriented California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, Bamber says she learned how to render objects “through trial and error, and what I could pick up from different people.” Obliged to research and devise exercises for teaching drawing, she said she finds they’ve helped her in her own work.

Bamber recently read an interview with the painter Agnes Mar-tin in which Martin said artists should not teach because they have to give so much to the students that there’s nothing left over.

“It’s true it can be very draining intellectually,” Bamber said. “At the end of the

day I feel I’ve kind of been emptied out. I don’t have anything left. [But] teaching one quarter a year is kind of a perfect amount. You have most of the year to recuperate from it and do your own work, and then you come back and you have a lot of energy.”

Even so, Bamber says she probably will try to get a tenure-track faculty job somewhere in the next few years, when she feels ready to commit to the responsibility involved. “If you teach, [joining a faculty] is really the thing to do,” she said.