How to open minds

Hugg’s teaching philosophy? Get out of the way

Herman Hugg is an artist, philosopher and storyteller, but all of these skills point toward his true talent. Herman is a teacher.

Every conversation is peppered with anecdotes that are designed to get one thinking. That is the key.

Herman moved to Beaumont in 1954 to teach art and English at the old South Park High School.

“I really never regretted not moving away,” he said.

The year before, Isabelle Robertson, the head of his college art department, wrote a letter to her former students. She talked about several students who were going to big-name colleges such as Penn State and Columbia to work on their doctorates.

“And she wrote, ‘Herman Hugg, of all things, is teaching English at Pocahontas High School in Pocahontas, Arkansas,” he said. “I did and loved it. It was too much work, grading papers and such, but you can see the kids getting the love of poetry. Not all of them, mind.

“But it’s like art. You can teach a big art class and if you reach a few, you’re doing pretty good. That’s just human nature.”

Herman said he was fortunate that South Park was one of the richest districts in the state.

“I was in a corner room on the top floor that had been designed as art room when it was built,” he said. “It had a huge window in it.”

He didn’t originally plan to stay in Beaumont for 55 years. He taught for 27 years, during which time he influenced more students than he can count.

Among his students was acclaimed artist John Alexander, who, he says, was unusually talented.

“He was highly intelligent — you know, what they call a native intelligence — he was well blessed,” Herman said. “He also had a very good ability to draw and paint.”

Herman emphasizes diversity in the creative process.

“We never know who we are,” he said.

He is obsessed with quotations from all manner of people. Some are well known, but many are from acquaintances or just from articles he has read in the newspaper. He picks through a stack of boards on which are written pearls of wisdom. A glint comes to his eye as he pulls one out and he reads it:

Intelligent people talk about ideas.

Average people talk about things.

Small people talk about other people.

“I think of my own fellow teachers,” he says. “We had an hour break every day and we had a teachers lounge where we could relax and do studies. Well, this (quote) is a lot like my fellow teachers.”

He laughs loudly at the thought of it. Herman is an exponent of equal opportunity. As well as being a teacher, he is a student of humanity and prefers to focus on people’s positives rather than their negatives.

Some teachers are not committed to the teaching process he said, “because they were not doing what they wanted to.”

“Art is a passion with most of us,” he says. “Although I have seen art teachers who were bored to death, but that was their fault. They should have got off it.

He leans back and says a good teacher doesn’t really teach much to students when it comes to art.

“Art is caught, not taught,” he says.

“I never bothered with (John) Alexander. My contribution to John Alexander was to leave him alone. He already knew as much as I did about technique, mixing colors and all that jazz. Now let him go.”

It is a question of making art available to the student and giving them the freedom to explore their creativity.

“As students explore the material world, my hope is that they realize they are simultaneously exploring the materials within themselves,” he says. “It’s all about potential.”

He sweeps his arm toward the myriad of boxes, pieces of wood, photographs and paraphernalia scattered about his property.

“That’s why all this crap’s lying around here,” he says. “People come in and look around and say, ‘Why doesn’t that old bastard get rid of all that junk?’ Well, I never put this sign up, but I want to. It says, ‘As you look around the life’s work of this 88-year-old man, if you do not see substance, please leave through the doors whence you came.’

“People will come and visit and they don’t know — and they don’t care.”

He shows off a photo of students working on one of his projects

“Here’s an interesting little note. I came across an old photo of students in 1963 gathered around an old Christmas tree. Well, you can see them all over the place now. And I had it in my thesis. You can buy them everywhere now — I should have copyrighted it.”

He said that he was always happy to get kids in his classes who had machine shop or wood shop experience.

“Know-how is so important,” he says. “When you know how to do something, if you’ve got wild ideas, you might get them done.”

Herman said focused on technique when it came to promoting a student’s imagination. Giving students skills allows them to use them later when they create.

He does not consider himself a ceramicist, but believes that clay is a great teaching tool because it offers potential.

“If you get a lump of clay, it’s surprising what you can do,” he says. “The more you allow them to play, the more they advance.”

Herman believes that art is about expression. He quotes the sculptor Henry Moore as saying, “Between beauty of expression and power of expression there is a difference of function. The first aims at pleasing the senses, the second has a spiritual vitality which for me is more moving and goes deeper than the senses.”

When asked to pick artists from whom students can learn, he chooses Norman Rockwell as one. He cites the Saturday Evening Post cover of a man who has obviously has a hard life standing by the side of the road with his son who has a suitcase. It is so much more than a simple rendition. The story behind the image is rich, he says.  That is expression.

Another of his favorites is Picasso.

“We got to admit it, sometimes he gets across to us,” Herman says. “The grey painting, ‘Guernica,’ is one.

Herman believes that people are too concerned with graphic realism, photo-realism, to the point that they do not allow themselves to just create.”

“So many art educators say, don’t let them copy,” he says. “Well, I say, let them copy. That’s how I got into art myself. Look at the great men who express things. I like to think of Rauschenberg with his torn-up cardboard, and his dead goats and chickens. He is pulling our leg, but also he’s not. He could get things across.

“But we are so literally minded, we don’t stop to get to the nitty-gritty. Who gives a damn if it’s exact.

“It’s like little children drawing. Leave them alone. Don’t judge them, yet. A child will draw a house and the parents will say, ‘he’s got the doorknob way up here.’ But it’s because he’s short and to him, it is up there. I don’t think we need to say, ‘Johnny, it’s not that high.’ To him it is and we are arguing against a gut feeling.”

Artists must be allowed to find a way for the creativity to flow. Maybe a musician keeps hitting keys on a piano until a tune appears. A painter will keep making marks until an image appears to him. That is Herman’s philosophy. Keep doing and the art will come.

“Some people can’t spring off of that — they are too stuck in a mud hole,” he says.

Herman was married with two children. His oldest son Michael is 56. His youngest son, Mark, died at age 27. Herman points proudly to a photograph of Mark in his Texas A&M corps uniform.

“He and a girlfriend had gone to church one Wednesday night and they were outside talking and he collapsed. And that was it,” Herman said. “We never thought to have an autopsy because…the pressure hits you, man, and knocks you over, you know.”

Herman is as philosophical about it as he is about everything.

“He was a bright kid and had so much to give,” he said.

Herman said he was looking at the picture one day with an ex-student and the student’s son. The boy said, “I guess God needed him up in heaven.”

“We need good men down here, don’t we?” Herman said. “I don’t think God does things like that.”

Herman was married for 22 years to Elizabeth Joiner, “A pretty little schoolmarm from up in the farming country in Texas, way up in the Panhandle.”

The pair met in college.

“She and I had a date for lunch one day and I never showed up, I can’t remember the reason,” he said. “This little lady got perturbed about this. She was taking an art class in ceramic and clay and made this sculpture…an Indian scalping a white man. This fellow on the bottom represents Herman Hugg.”

He breaks out in a sustained chuckle as he shows off the piece, which he subsequently had bronzed.

“Man, that’s great work,” he said.

Herman is philosophical about the couple’s eventual divorce.

“My wife and I had a great friendship and two wonderful children,” he said.

Walking around his house, listening to his stories, one is struck by the ongoing narrative that is Herman’s life. Each chapter is told in rich detail with little room for sentimentality. One senses that Herman appreciates all of the experiences, be they good or bad, as part of what has shaped him. Maybe Herman’s most enduring artistic creation is the artist himself.

He switches tack again, back to the idea of promoting the arts in society. He says churches and other groups can always do more to promote the arts.

“Would they be committing crimes against God and man, if churches, synagogues, mosques…held showings of the visual arts, parents and children, grandma’s old quilts, and so on?” he said. “It would be a social thing about bringing people closer together. There’s really no religion in it either way.”

Herman pauses for a moment and announces that he is working on starting a new church, a project he has been working on most of his life.

“I’m thinking about putting a sign out in the front. ‘Coming soon at this location. Church of the Open Mind. Herman Hugg, founder and pastor,’” he said.

He pauses for a moment.

“Will God damn us for doubting? Or will he thank us for thinking?”

For 88 years, Herman Hugg has been doing. And as long as he has breath, he plans to keep on doing. And thinking.

Andy Coughlan
ISSUE Editor