Massachusetts College of Art and Design - Palette and Pen Yearbook (Boston, MA)

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are graduating from the Massachusetts School of Art. At some time during the past four years the letters of that name hlurred into a far more significant pattern than any type face could reveal. It is a beautifully intricate pattern, and so dearly familiar that its details have become one large impression. To say home to one who is still living at home does not conjure up separate memories, but an emotion without name and indescribable, an association of the familiar. So it is with us. Perhaps in retro- spect the name will mean a succession of clear cut memories, incidents, places, and people, — the first picnic at Provincetown, fencing in the Junior D. P. room, old Shelt on singing to the freshmen. But now, the weaving of the pattern not yet done, it is difficult to stand apart and choose the underlying motifs that are the strength and beauty of the cloth. Tliese major designs are so large that all the rest seem bright threads of decoration and their strongly woven web is made of an unsentimental recogni- tion of the principles of art. We learned them not from one instructor, but from all the men and women who have guided us in the past four years. I hey may feel that the lesson has been imperfectly realized. Yet the sturdy material of it is there: our own exfierience will exj)lain what we understand in [ art now. I ' .ach ol us has a different [)attern because it is a II the st ulf of individual exf)erience and friendships, but there was much that we all shared during oiir freshman year. I hat first Se[)tember we were continually bedazzled, lliere was the glamorous vision ol the Pageant and our green Smock Day. Watching a succession of three Smock Days sin e has bound the .years with a green

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Life Painting John Ananis V 4 A ikJ M

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tKread. In the spring we made our Pilgrimage with Mr. Jamison to Lexington and Concord, a blue and gold day beneath the elms of Concord green and the tall pines of Sleepy Hollow. We were signally privileged in making our acquaintance with color under the gracious Anna Mayhew Hathaway and in watching Cyrus the Great make our inert clay round and living. Along the banks of Muddy River and before sparkling still life groups we learned to make juicy ” ones under the bustling tutelage of kindly Miss Bartlett. The next fall found us acutely conscious of our added dignity and os- tentatiously impressing the freshmen with the same. But that is traditional. On every campus sophomores plunge as we did into the deeps of Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Idealism, study the action of motor neurones and the ductless glands. But our birthright as artist-sophomores was fulfilled in painting with the aid of Mr. Hamilton’s color fringe glass and creating compositions under the stimulus of Mr. Major s ’Whoop it up, daughter half close your eyes and stand on your head! ” On warm starlit nights of that spring we often joined the silent throng that stood ten deep in the aisles to hear Robert Frost at Harvard. At the beginning of the Junior year we made a somehow inevitable choice and were definitely enlisted under the standards of Mr. Philbrick, Mr. Allen, Miss Whittier, or Mr. Porter. But irrespective of departmental persuasion, the class journeyed to Worcester for the Rembrandt exhibition, and again moved en masse for the Van Gogh show at the Boston Art Museum. The de- partments also joined forces in a second attempt to interest the school in that step-child of the Mascart Theatre ‘ The Swan ”. More or less serene in our rank as upperclassmen, we talked severally of practice teaching and the Pea-