Studios, Schools: 2-Way Streets : Barbara Berk / IRVINE VALLEY COLLEGE

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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Barbara Berk, 56, has been teaching art for nearly 25 years. In recent years, shuttling between her home in Laguna Beach and an apartment-studio in Venice, she has been giving foundation-level courses at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles and Irvine Valley College. During summers, she teaches art at Bosphorus University in Istanbul, Turkey.

“In the best situation,” said Berk, whose conceptual work has been exhibited widely in Orange County and was part of a spring three-person show at Griffin Contemporary Exhibitions in Venice, “I can move the ideas I’m interested in as an artist into the teaching, so the two ways of working complement each other.

“Teaching pushes me, against my will a lot of times, to get deeper and think of things I might not get to on my own.”

A few months ago, she said, was trying to rethink a project for “Form and Space,” the 3-D design class she teaches at Otis in the spring. Berk wanted to substitute a sphere for the cube traditionally used in classroom exercises.

“There’s something interesting about the sphere,” Berk said, “because the outside is only there because of the inside. And it rolls--it has to do with movement. Map makers [trying] to project the Earth on a two-dimensional surface have a huge number of difficulties with it. That’s the difference between 2-D and 3-D.

“I was thinking, How do I have these students make a sphere? Well, you can make a sphere out of lines. You can take a flat sheet of paper and roll it into a ball. . . . After I taught it, it was still interesting to me.”

As a result, a couple of Berk’s recent pieces--shown at Griffin and the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art in Newport Beach--were made by turning the pages of hefty art history books into globe-like spheres.

Reluctant to view teaching as a “performance” for her students to watch passively, Berk says she sees it as collaborating with them.

“This is where it gets tricky,” she said. “As a teacher I’m expected to know something and have something to give, but as an artist I can feel I know nothing and I’ll never make a piece of art again.

“I can go into the studio with all my doubts, not having a particular schedule, and play and be silly and not know what I’m doing.”

One big problem with teaching is its repetitive nature, Berk says. “I’ve taught at Otis seven, eight years, and it’s always the same darn course. How do you make it interesting semester after semester? You can [teach] on a surface level, where you’re just passing out information and being real dogmatic, or you can start from the ground up every single time.

“That takes a tremendous amount of energy and may not even work. The students have to do their part. There’s nothing worse than feeling like you’re the only one who’s working.

“Students come in with a mind-set--what they think art is, the issue of talent--and to dismantle those preconceived ideas takes a lot of work.”

Once in a while, the work pays off. When Berk took her Irvine Valley students, who she says tend to be enthralled by commercial art, to the Santa Ana studio of sculptor Cornelius O’Leary, “their eyes were constantly roving over the space. They saw some things that were not art, things that might become art. [They began thinking], ‘How does a person make art?’ ”

Berk says making her own work is crucial to maintaining a positive state of mind about teaching. But balancing both has been difficult.

About 15 years ago, when she taught full time at the Art Institute of Southern California in Laguna Beach, she said, she went to her studio at 6 a.m. to devote three or four precious hours to her art. “I made myself sick by the end of the year, but I wasn’t going to give up the work.”

Even teaching part time, the long semesters (Irvine Valley’s is 17 weeks) can seem endless. “I question whether that’s the best way for me to be working,” Berk said. “How much time and energy can you give to it without it taking over?”

Meanwhile, Berk, who has no dealer representation, sounds fatalistic about the fact that her art rarely sells.

“I just do the best I can and maybe eventually some people might know about me,” she said. “Students will ask me, ‘I’m thinking of majoring in art. Will I be able to support myself?’ I end up having to tell them it’s risky and you have to really want it.”