Creativity Flows at a Campus-to-Be
Cal State Channel Islands doesn’t yet have that collegiate look.
It’s sunshine-rich, but ivy-challenged. No Frisbees yet fly over the emerald-green quad. No worry-worn parents yet haul steamer trunks full of cash up to the registrar’s office. As you drive onto the grounds of the institution that lately was Camarillo State Hospital, you see a sign--not for the administration building or the student union, but for a used-furniture warehouse that leases space from the university.
Still, a distinctly campus-like thing is happening on the campus-to-be.
In a sprawling old building that once was the hospital’s library and recreation hall, a few painters have quietly set up their easels. Studio space for as many as 15 others is up for grabs. Pieces by local artists hang in the building’s gallery. Workshops are in the works. The first student in the university’s first class--can it be the Class of ‘02?--has yet to show up, but Studio Channel Islands Arts Center is open for business.
“We don’t get an awful lot of foot traffic,” said Gerd Koch, the center’s volunteer director and a man with a knack for understatement. The campus is a mile or so down a placid, winding road from the strawberry fields of Highway 34. It’s not remote, but it is removed--as detached as any minimalist canvas, or, for that matter, as any large state mental institution.
Even so, a Van Gogh talk by Koch last month drew more than 100 people. A similar crowd is expected at 7 p.m. Sunday, when a well-traveled Ventura photographer named William Hendricks explores “Cuba and the New Revolution.”
But ordinary days at Studio Channel Islands are less hectic. From time to time, people on the campus maintenance staff wander in to talk art with Koch. You know, “I have a kid who’s real good at drawing . . .”
Koch listens patiently and sometimes offers a little advice, as he did for 32 years to his art students at Ventura College.
“I used to tell them there’s two ways you can go,” he said. “You can cater to the public and put out a product. Or you can go with fine art, and make something that reflects your philosophy. The second way, you usually starve a bit.”
Koch is quick to point out that the studio is not part of the new school. University officials encouraged it--one even made it to a cleanup weekend with a broom and a rake--then leased the building to Koch and company.
It was a good move. Eventually, the campus will educate squadrons of computer engineers, battalions of accountants, legions of practical people who get things done and make tons of money. For now, it’s heartening to see a bow to something as relentlessly, flagrantly, exuberantly impractical as art.
Koch and I slowly walked through the building where the hospital’s patients once gathered to read, work on crafts, play table tennis, get their hair done. Outside, he points to a weedy spot where ceramics will be baked in fire pits at a workshop this summer. Inside, the walls are thick, the air is cool, and the dominant color is a dirty beige.
Where I saw a worn linoleum floor and an empty space the size of a dozen tract homes, Koch saw sculptors hacking at big hunks of stone, painters squeezing out their souls in pigment, perhaps even a ballerina dancing her way through. Handwritten signs designated different areas: the Ansel Adams Room, the big Michelangelo Room (Big Mike), the little Michelangelo Room (Little Mike).
In Koch’s studio, canvases exploding with color reflect his more recent obsessions. Here was Anubis, the jackal-headed Egyptian god of embalming; there were Monet and Van Gogh, deep in conversation.
Next door, Roxie Ray-Bordelon paints farm workers from photographs she has made in nearby fields. She likes the light, the serenity, the chance to focus on her work without distraction.
At one time a clinical social worker, she remembers half-jokingly telling a friend that she wanted “a place to go where you’d be fed and forced to exercise, and they’d just let you paint the rest of the time.
“My friend laughed and said that sounds like a hospital--and somehow I’ve wound up here.”
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Steve Chawkins is a Times staff writer. His e-mail address is steve.chawkins@latimes.com.
