putterings 055 < 056 > 057 index
it was raining outside.
- ...There is no art school or department in the university and, until the inauguration of the program, there were few campus facilities for art to take place as a means of recreation for the layman public. However, the chief concern of the Union art program has been the better balanced student, not the art-minded one.
- Each year, several hundred students are newly attracted to use the leisure-time opportunities offered in this hobby project, the three Puttering Shop playrooms located in the basement of the Union Building. There they may work in wood, leather, and plastics, paint and draw, do postermaking, model in clay, carve stone, make and fire their own ceramics, construct models, and make charts that will be useful to them in their course work.
- A classic with us is the remark of one student : “I started puttering because it was raining outside. Now I putter because I just can’t help it.” He realized that what he produced was not that mystery of the layman — great art. But it was certainly fun. It filled his personal need for recreation.
- We have found that those who have had previous experience with Puttering Shop art and craft media — except in grade and a few high school classes — are in the small minority. But once a university student has discarded the pseudo-sophisticated notion that such activity is either beneath his dignity of above his head and has actually tried making something, his product invariably surprises and pleases him.
... - In as highly technical a school as Purdue, there has been a real need for the mental and emotional playground the Puttering Shops provide. Our students have learned in their classrooms two things indispensable to those who would do creative work either professionally or as an avocation. They have learned to do orderly or qualified thinking. They have also learned to respect materials. Rare are the credit classes where they can learn to think of materials creatively in terms of human wants and needs. In the Puttering Shops they may learn this. Thus the accomplishments of their leisure time may later become of considerable professional value.
- It is sometimes difficult for a man to continue in his leisure time to think in an orderly way and with direction. By “puttering” we do not mean to suggest a purposeless frittering away of one’s time. If the student lets his capacities for concentration idle during his leisure time, his efficiency in his school routine will be seriously impaired. Conversely, his good playing habits will improve his working habits.
— Robert O. Parks (Director of Art Activities, Memorial Union Building, Purdue University), “The Arts of War” in The Journal of Health and Physical Education 13:8 (October 1942) : 469-471, 492-493
pdf (270 KB)
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an interesting volume, January-December 1942. wartime.
Robert O. Parks (1916?-1998), later professor at Herron School of Art, curator at the University of New Mexico...
“After Mr. Parks retired, he developed substance-abuse and DUI programs in New Mexico. He came to Chicago about 15 years ago to direct the residential substance abuse program for Episcopal Charities and also volunteered at the Salvation Army and Northwestern Memorial Hospital.”
source (Chicago Tribune)