[There is some discussion at the beginning of the tape while setting up for the interview.]

James: This is the Oral History Project interview with Professor Charles Kenneth Sibley on July 26, 1976 in his home in Portsmouth, Virginia. Professor Sibley, could you briefly discuss your early life in Huntington, West Virginia?

Sibley: I was a Depression child, certainly, and very much a part of those difficult years, for my generation at least - life in the early thirties. We were a very proud family, a family not on relief, and a family with very little to eat at some times because of this. And it affected, I think, pretty much my attitude toward material things today. You never really get over those years, when you're from age, say, six to twelve, and very insecure financially. And it has affected my adult years so far as a feeling of owning things and having security. Aside from that, Huntington, I think, was a city with very little cultural life, a West Virginia river town, the usual conventional public school system. I could go on and on about this, about how the girls sat on one side of the room, the boys sat on the other side of the room, saluting the flag, the usual pigtail attitude of the children toward their studies, the riveted seats, the oiled floors. It sounds dreary. At the same time West Virginia had a very wonderful beauty for me so far as the hills and the natural setting that was there. I enjoy West Virginia today still, but I still also have a kind of negativeness toward the cities or the towns and the people in West Virginia. I think that's about all I can say about my early life in Huntington.

James: When and how did you decide on a career in art?

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Sibley: I didn't really decide on it because it was always there. I started at a very early age to draw and paint. I remember one of my first punishments was for crawling up on a gas stove to reach a mantle shelf when I was about four, I suppose, and on the mantle shelf was my paint box. And I didn't want to bother the grownups to ask for it, so I sort of stepped up on a hydrant, as they called it, hydrant gas radiant heat stove, and I broke it. The leg snapped, and the stove lid fell down on the rug. And I was taken to task for this by my father and protected by my grandmother, who happened to be visiting, because she said, "He only wanted his paints." But I from the very beginning had a kind of affinity for visual expression and wanted to be an artist. And I was fortunate in this because I never questioned my direction or my desires.

James: What were some of your experiences while majoring in commercial art at Ohio State University?

Sibley: I was so young at Ohio State, so immature. You see, my parents taught the children in my family to read and write well before school years. This is part of, perhaps, my attitude toward children in their early years. I think that children in Europe who live on boundary areas or in small countries where they have contact with several languages have a great advantage over our people, where we have one language only. Children who are four are quite capable of learning German, French, and English simultaneously. I've spoken to children in Europe who are multiple in this sense, and children can learn a great deal at very early ages if it's expected of them. So we were taught as a kind of game, and we liked it. But as a result we were put ahead in school, unfortunately. In those days if you could master the curriculum you were put where you happened to level off regardless of your social development, so I ended up in college at a very early age. I was fifteen and very young and insecure because of my youth and bound and determined that I was going to excel. It was the only way I had of compensating for my inability to adjust socially with students - balance it out by getting good grades and by being the scholar. So I studied constantly. And then the war came along while I

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was still in college, and I began to grow up a little bit, and I threw caution to the wind. I quit studying, and I started doing everything that I hadn't done. I joined a fraternity, and skipped class a lot. My grades came down some, but I was still basically a dean's list student and still very much a child throughout those four years at Ohio State. But in a way it was all for the best because, if I hadn't been able to start college so early, I would have been yanked out and put in the Service. And as it was I was able to have the bachelor's degree finished before I went into the Service, and that enabled me, of course, to become a young officer.

James: Could you briefly recount some of your experiences during the three years you spent in the Navy during the war?

Sibley: Those were exciting years and difficult years and years that I look on now with a certain satisfaction and nostalgia, perhaps, because I was able to travel so widely. I went around the world two complete times and was all over the Asiatic district and was a communicator, first, on a Naval tanker for about two years. Then I was in liaison work. And while I was frightened much of the time and thought I was going to die, I still grew a great deal. I painted and drew in my spare moments, when I could. I wrote when I could. I was pretty much an island unto myself on that oiler because there were no people that I could really communicate with there. The officers were not sympathetic toward my philosophy or my thoughts of creativity. They were all future businessmen. And so I stayed pretty much to myself with my own activity, and I was lonely. But I began to work with the British people at the close of the war and the liaison segment of my Naval career; I was much more content. Of course, I traveled then a great deal, and that was the thing, which I've never recovered from because I continue to travel at every opportunity.

{Some overlapping discussion about length of interview}

James: Following the war you worked as a commercial artist at Marshall Field's in Chicago. What influence did this experience have on your artistic ambitions?

Sibley: Well, I had majored, of course, in commercial art and thought that I wanted to be a success in that direction.

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And the Navy experience had some bearing on my attitude toward the product-oriented commercial aspect of selling and drawing things to make them look better than they are, oftentimes. Of course, advertising is hardly aesthetic or hardly personal. It's really a rather shoddy kind of activity to be in. I realized this after one year and knew that I had the GI Bill of Rights educational opportunity awaiting me should I decide to change my career plans. And this, of course, was very fine for me and influenced my decision to stop working in commercial art and to go back to school and to do graduate work, which I did. I earned two graduate degrees, plus some additional work at Chicago Art Institute, and I just feel that commercial art is something for some people if you happen to be of the personal adjustment, which works with it. I found that it was not the kind of life that I wanted to have. I contributed very little to other people. I did make more money then than I make now, relatively, so far as inflation is concerned.

James: Could you briefly discuss your graduate work at the Teachers College of Columbia and the State University of Iowa?

Sibley: When I went back to school on the GI Bill, I had a great awakening, and many doors opened for me through hard work. I had always been in love with self-expression. Even as a commercial artist, I would go home and do the kind of thing I wanted to do instead of doing the advertisement. When I finally could devote all of my time to study - by this time I was in my mid-twenties - I was mature enough to think and to see and to really respond to this opportunity. And being in New York with all of its fine museums, associating with other art students my own age was one of the richest periods of my life. I left Columbia to go to Iowa because at Iowa at that time there was probably the best graduate school in the United States existing. We had some of the people from the Bauhaus. German expressionist Max Beckman was there as artist in residence for awhile. Philip Gustin, who I knew, is now in New York. Iowa, I think, did as much as any experience that I had as a graduate student to make me a devoted artist. I grew a great deal while I was there. I didn't show my work. I worked constantly, and I didn't exhibit anything until probably at least a year after I had received the degree. When I went to Iowa, I was going to get a doctorate because I already had a master's degree. And they were one of the few universities at that time which offered a Ph.D. on the basis of a creative thesis, not a

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written thesis, but a painted or a sculpted thesis. And so I was a candidate for that degree. Another man who was there at the time was very controversial, and a great deal of friction arose with his committee, and they closed the degree. So I took a second master's degree in its place and never really earned the Ph.D. That's why I went there -- was not to earn a second master's but to begin work on a doctorate.

James: In 1948 you accepted a position at Duke University and taught there for one year. What were some of your early teaching experiences?

Sibley: Well, the most vivid thing I can recall about my first teaching experiences was the realization that I could help others as I had once been helped. I found it very easy to project myself into my students' mind and to sympathize and to identify on the basis of my own experience. And I realized that I was able to change people's thoughts, change people's lives, and to make them become different people and to grow and to move forward. And I like to think that - well, you can't do this with each student you touch. If during a year you touch one or two people, even, who will remember you the rest of their life as being someone who added significantly to their thought, then this is a very far cry from the kind of reward that you get in commercial art where the paycheck comes and emptiness with it. In teaching, the paycheck is not as rich an envelope, perhaps, but the other riches are there, very much so. And I began to realize this, of course, as soon as I began dealing with the young art student at Duke University.

James: Could you explain the circumstances surrounding your receiving a Tiffany grant?

Sibley: Well, as I have said, I did not exhibit my work until after that period at Duke University. The first painting I exhibited was the spring, the first spring I was at Duke. And it was reproduced in Arts magazine and received an invitation to the Carnegie International. I was the youngest American at the Carnegie International that year. And I had multiple successes that spring. It seemed as if I just couldn't stop my exuberance and my belief in myself, and the successes that came to me added fuel to the fire. I couldn't breathe, hardly, for painting and for thinking

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everything was wonderful with my life. Among those successes was the grant which came from Louis Comfort Tiffany which gave me a two years' income to do what ever I wanted to do to study. And what did I do with it? I went to - the question which follows, which says I lived on Portsmouth Island. I did. I went to the Outer Banks in North Carolina, bought an empty building, set up a studio there, slept in a hammock, cooked in the yard for the first year, had a trench privy out behind some cedar trees - no plumbing, no electricity, nothing much but just myself and a roof over my head and the paint and the people who lived there as fishermen. And I stayed there those two years working intently and getting a great deal of pleasure from it.

James: How great an importance did this experience have in gaining national recognition?

Sibley: Well, I had -- there was a story about a man on a boat... I lived about forty miles from the nearest railway express office, and I had to ship my paintings to New York. On the basis of my earlier success I had been asked to be represented at Babcock Gallery on Madison Avenue in New York and accepted this. And I had to get my paintings up to Madison Avenue from this island off the Carolina coast. The people up there were really amazed. When I'd go to New York I still had my college clothes, my tweed suits and so forth. And I would go up there looking very different from someone who might be living on a little island south of Cape Hatteras. And they had a rather difficult time at first understanding me and understanding my physical difficulty in getting work up there because these paintings were large. They had to be crated and put into motorboats – motor launches rather and taken out to the mail boat. I had to go with the mail boat for forty miles into Beaufort, North Carolina, and there have them sent by railway express to New York. Then I would get on a bus and follow and help arrange the whole thing for openings. But during that time my work was purchased by some of the major museums. The most important is the Metropolitan in New York. They purchased a painting of mine called "Harbor Island," which is an island near Portsmouth Island. And I continued to send my work during the fifties to national shows and continued to receive awards and occasional purchases from museums. I think in all it totals around nine museums which have purchased my work.

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James: You left the Outer Banks to accept a position at the State University of Texas. What were your reasons for leaving a large, well-endowed university and coming to the Norfolk Division of the College of William and Mary in 1955?

Sibley: First of all, I went to the University of Texas because I couldn't find a job very easily. My grant had run out, and my sales were not really - and no artist's sales are enough to really live on if he paints what he wants to paint. That's a continuing problem with me because you can paint certain kinds of things and earn a living, but if you paint what you want to paint, you don't earn much. And so I was hard up and I had to take what jobs I could find, and I found an excellent job teaching painting at the University of Texas, and I went there. I left there after three years because I was such a small cog in a very large department, and I wanted to try to mold and start my own department. And that's why I came to then what was then the College of William and Mary.

James: Could you describe the condition of the art department when you joined the faculty at Norfolk?

Sibley: Well, when I came here it was the result of a letter which I had written to Mr. Webb in 1955, I think it was, or '54, and he told me to stop by if I came East from Texas. So I did that Christmas. It was snowing in Norfolk, and I got off the bus and walked across the Larchmont area, and the school was such a tiny place. Quonset huts were being used, some of them heated with coal stoves. They were beginning to draw the plans for what is now the old science building. We had the old administration building and the public school on Bolling, which is now torn down and some Quonset huts and the stadium. It was like a little high school, and after Texas it seemed so remote and small and hopeless. Mr. Webb was most understanding, a warm, personal administrator, such an encouraging, fine person to deal with, always willing to listen, always willing to stop whatever he was doing. We felt in those days, and there were certainly few of us, that we could knock on the door and go in and chat and talk at any time. That's one of the fine things about being a very small college. We weren't even accredited then, of course, and were very much a part of William and Mary. Actually, there was no art department at all when I arrived. And I began in the basement of that old public school building which was over there, which has been torn down, in the room that was formerly

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the elementary school cafeteria. And I taught everything myself - painting, the drawing, design, art history and art education. I worked evening college and day college. The first four years that I was here I worked from probably eight o'clock until ten o'clock almost every day, plus having a very busy creative life painting. I painted in the same room where I taught, and when five o'clock came I scooted easels aside, moved my desk and set up my own workshop. And during the day I had to fight constantly to keep the students from moving my wet pictures to look to see what "Teach" was doing. In those days we had to wear - and this sounds odd -let's see, I'll start over again; look at the next question, because I may be --

James: What changes or innovations did you institute as head of the art department?

Sibley: Well, I couldn't make any changes because there was nothing there to change. I just started the department. I'll go ahead and answer these one at a time instead of jumping ahead. What I felt should happen there in getting the art department started was to try to keep it as basic and healthy as possible. I didn't allow courses in commercial art to occur. I didn't allow anything other than the simplest kinds of design, drawing, painting and art history courses to occur; with only one teacher the first year, it was impossible for more than that to happen. The second year - no, it was the third and fourth year - we added two people. We added an art historian and person in art education. And actually my feeling was that, insofar as possible, I should try to attract, not the art major, but the liberal arts student into the art department one time at least while he was doing that four-year stint at what was then William and Mary. So a lot of my emphasis went into art history and art appreciation so that I could get the, touch the visual cultural factor of the undergraduate student. I felt that our role was to prepare teachers and to have an art introduction in the liberal arts direction and not necessarily to groom the art major to become an artist. And that remained my goal for quite a few years until we had grown considerably.

James: In 1957 the first major art exhibit in the history of the college was held. Could you discuss your role in organizing college and community art events?

Sibley: I don't know that I had very much of a role in organizing community events. I do say that we were and still are a community institution. I entered as fully as possible into-- as my time would allow, into the cultural life of the community,

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judging art shows, attending meetings of the art teachers. The first year I was here I went every month to the Norfolk Public School Art Division meetings where all the art teachers were drawn together for their monthly meeting because we had to prepare art teachers to satisfy the Norfolk system. And I felt it was important that I know the basic framework of the art administration in the Norfolk system. I'm wandering a bit; now could you read the question to me again, please?

James: Could you discuss your role in organizing college and community art events? It was in relation to...

Sibley: The art exhibit?... Well, the art exhibit, as far as that goes, that was work which the students themselves voted on as being the best work done during the year. And I had it very much a student exhibition. The kids hung it; they made their own frames; many times they handled the publicity; they handled the complete thing from top to bottom. I was there as their advisor, to encourage them, to help them in any way I could. But I felt that an art exhibition should not be an artificially groomed exhibition which reflected my thoughts but really should reflect the actual student. I'm very much in favor of student participation in university government, in the university life in an ever-increasing and stronger way. I felt that at that time. I've had quite a few events during my period at ODU which, I think, indicate my liberal attitude toward the student and toward minority groups. For instance, I had at registration probably about eighteen years ago - a very lovely black person came to me. She was from the Caribbean, and she had an English accent. She was a partially -- pretty light-skinned black person, a beautiful woman. And she had a master's degree from a New York school, and she wanted to take some painting. And I immediately began to register her, and I was called aside by some of the administration and told to stop the registration and to tell the person to call at the registrar's office the next day. I knew immediately why. She had been given information on the phone and told to come to the school because of her English accent, because she didn't say "Who done that?" And when they saw she was black, the school administrators, knowing the political situation in Virginia, knew that if I registered her that I would automatically be cutting the school's throat. And it just couldn't be done at that time. The woman was very gracious, very embarrassed, and, underneath, angry. I saw her about, oh, perhaps ten years later, and she said she would never forgive me for having done that to her. And I told

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her that I was awfully sorry, that she didn't know the whole story, and probably never would. But, again, I would have been one of the first people to - the art department was the first person to hire black faculty. I would be one of the first people to work with and recognize minority groups. I would be one of the first people at the university to go all out to have the students have a very definite power in deciding the path of their institution. I think this is important. I may be speaking out of turn here, but I do think we have students at this school; that is what it's about. And I think these students generally have enough intelligence and enough thought and enough concern about their future and about how their money's being spent to have a legitimate voice in determining many of the things that evolve and are evolving at the university. Do you agree?

James: Yes, I do. I also agree that the faculty should have a meaningful voice.

Sibley: I think it's both sides. (End of side one of tape.)

Sibley: Where are we?

James: Okay. We're on the ones that might be a little unfair.

James: You were named to the Who's Who in American Art in 1959 and to Who's Who in America in 1960. Did or do honors such as these have any impact on the way you express yourself as an artist?

Sibley: I don't think they have any impact at all, and I really think that the Who's Who listings that I've had, which go through about six years of Who's Who in America, are paper honors and due to circumstances more than to attainment. I don't know that they have any real significance at all. That's about all I can say on that.

James: From 1960 you have had many exhibitions at well-known galleries in New York City and elsewhere. In your opinion, does artistic taste or appreciation vary from North to South?

Sibley: I could say, "Does artistic taste and appreciation vary any from Europe to North America?" We go in little, I suppose -like the rock dropped in the pond and causing circles to go further and further away from the nucleus. The South is province; it's provincial. The North is more or less where things have taken place in the past, and the North, again, New York has been imitating Paris and Rome. There's nothing new under the sun, and an honest person can do just as much creative regardless of where they live. Basically, I think that the problems are the same the world over, rather like life is the same the world over.

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James: Many of your students, such as Fay Zetlin, have emerged as prominent artists. What relationship does teaching art have with the 'doing', as compared with teaching history and doing historical research, for example?

Sibley: I know for certain that the 'doing' has a great deal to do with learning and that those people who are in history, historical research, who don't do and who have never really experienced in a serious, prolonged way creative efforts have a rather dry and limited understanding of what self expression is about visually. They would be the last ones to admit this. But I've seen so many of them whom... I remember one lady, a Ph.D., who was president of the American Association of Aesthetics. She was an international figure and writer, a philosopher; an aesthetic philosopher is exactly what Dr. Gelbert was. And she came to my studio one day, and on the wall there was a very fine Cezanne color reproduction -- watercolor reproduction and some student work and some of my work, and they were all there together. I had been talking to the people I worked with about their work, and we had been having a discussion generally about painting. She looked at the work for a good length of time. And I said, "Which one do you like the best?" And she pointed out one, and then finally the Cezanne; she said that was one of the better ones there. This, I think, is indicative of the kind of academic ceremony that goes along with academic research, rather far removed, often times, from the sweat and impact of an actual emotional experience in trying to express oneself. I think that it's a shame that we don't have much more art history in studio courses and much more painting and design in art history courses because I think they help very much each other in establishing contact with the field. So I'd say there's a very real relationship between the two aspects of art, both the academic aspect and the studio aspect, and that this needs to be brought together closer and closer. You mentioned Fay Zetlin as one of my outstanding students. She certainly has been. She's been of immense significance in her thoughts and influencing the art department and the students at ODU. She's a very skilled and gifted artist and a very warm and wonderful person with a truly strong and great mind. I have the highest regard and friendship for Fay Zetlin. I can't think of a student - I can hardly even think of her as a student of mine any more - but I can't think of anyone I've been associated with who I respect more than I do Mrs. Zetlin.

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James: Could you discuss some of your problems encountered in establishing the Old Dominion College Gallery in 1963?

Sibley: There we had a fairly new building and a space allotted to an art gallery. We with much effort approached wealthy people in the community as friends of the art department of Old Dominion University, and each year we were able to raise something in the neighborhood of $5,000, I suppose it was, $5,000 or $6,000. This money was used to rent works of art from New York, from places like the Library of Congress print show, shows from the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum. And these sometimes would be very expensive. For example, one exhibition I can recall at this time was an exhibition of the bronzes of Rodin, the French sculptor and Romanticist of the nineteenth century who did "The Thinker" and "The Kiss." And there on our little campus in that upstairs room, which is now the study room in the library there were probably around thirty original bronzes. We had to hire a guard day and night. We had some really exciting and good shows during this early period of trying to have a gallery on the campus. As the school grew and the "war babies" came on and the enrollment just mushroomed, we became so crowded and so under-budgeted that we had to do away with the gallery and begin to use it for what was really the bread of life and a more important necessity, space in which to study because an art gallery by definition is, I suppose, a frill or an added enrichment and not quite as essential as Introduction to English or Introduction to Design. So the gallery was done away with and made into study space.

James: In a newspaper interview in 1964 you stated that you felt your creative life was at a turning point. Did this feeling materialize, and can you now describe this change?

Sibley: No, I can't describe it because I'm still at a turning point. I've been at a turning point most of my life. I just continue to turn and to search and to look. And I think if ever I have said I had made the turn, I probably would be either dead or have stopped. I don't know what I meant at the time, even. I still feel that there's... I suppose... I do remember now. Felt that the day of the easel painting was gone and that the artist in his studio was too isolated from architecture, from the modern problems of city planning, that large wall paintings, working with light, neon light, working with moving color, combining painting and sculpture, were all more challenging new problems,

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problems more typical of life today than the two-dimensional surface with oil paint on an easel, and that's certainly what I had been involved with all my life. And I felt it was sort of a dead end. I remember that statement. I don't feel that the easel painting is a dead end any longer, so that's just another turn. I still like to do an easel painting. I like other things also, but the day of the easel painting hasn't gone as long as you have something to say.

James: Art and music are two departments that have been financially neglected. Could you discuss some of the problems, if any, that you had in this area as head of the department? How helpful or sympathetic was the administration in aiding the department's growth?

Sibley: Well, we've had continuing problems in Virginia with the extras, with the theater, with music, with art, and I suppose we will continue to have them. I resent sometimes the involvement of education and politics. They don't go hand in hand, really, and yet they are so much enmeshed and so confusing to the educator. We had to stop the art gallery on the campus because of that problem, not enough budget, not enough money, not enough space, and I felt at the time that closing the schools, about that era, I think, a lot of the closing of schools there were under budgeted, and there just isn't any sense, any logic, to anything that's happening in Virginia in education. Well, things have improved since that time. We still need a little art gallery on the campus, a place where we can have exhibitions from other universities, where we can have faculty shows, student shows, exhibitions from all sorts of stimulating sources from outside the community. The Chrysler Museum certainly is a wonderful addition. I'll never forget how I felt when they first came here that we could actually go down on a bus in a few minutes and see great works of art in our own community. I don't think that that is the function of a college gallery. Instead I think it would be much more of a intimate thing and of a college-level thing, the kind of exhibition which would be a faculty exchange with another university or showing work from the West Coast colleges and universities, shows that are aimed exclusively at stimulating thought and growth in design, structural design in nature, for instance. That kind of thing is what we should aim for in having a university gallery, and it should be on the campus where people can see it, who are

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not only art majors but the future school teacher, the future business person. I think we are under-budgeted, but I think that every single department in the university will tell you, yes, they are under-budgeted. And what can we do about it? It comes down to trying to apply pressure politically to increase the budget. And our students' parents and our students oftentimes don't even bother to vote. So it seems to me to be a kind of dilemma for which I have no answer. I haven't answered this completely yet because you asked me, I think, also about the sympathy that I had from the administration in aiding the department's growth. I had plenty of sympathy. Sympathy doesn't cost a thing. We had understanding, sympathy, and kindness. In being refused the request, I was always given a very clear and acceptable and logical reason for why it could not be processed or why it couldn't happen, what I wanted, and I understood it. And I didn't blame anyone. So I did have sympathy. But the problem is far afield, far away from the campus at Old Dominion University.

James: In 1972 you received a contract from Seventeen magazine for three large murals and from the Commonwealth of Virginia for a landscape in the executive mansion. Could you discuss some of the experiences you have had in doing large works such as the one for the USS Kennedy?

Sibley: Well, the Seventeen magazine murals were fortunate because the people concerned let me have a totally free hand. I could do whatever I wanted to do for a reception area in a building on Park Avenue in New York called Triangle Publications. And I went up to look at the site and photographed it and did the work, rolled it up and took it back and installed it. And it worked; it was just an ideal situation so far as design goes, with no ands, ifs, or buts. Now when I did the USS Kennedy, there I was doing a series of seven paintings for the wardroom of this aircraft carrier. And I had all sorts of strings attached there. One was private enterprise and was being managed by an art editor of an important publishing house. The USS Kennedy was being handled by the captain and an admiral. I did a study of a Navy chief with a tattoo on his arm, drinking beer. And he was a jolly old Navy chief. He was kicked out very fast because of the beer, because of the tattoo, and it had a kind of preconceived imagery which

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they didn't like - a type. They said, "That day in the Navy's gone" - the old bosun's mate. Well, it isn't gone. The bosun's mate is still around. The retired chief petty officer can be seen in many taverns in Norfolk. The gunnery officer in the ship bought the painting from me; he liked it. I didn't lose anything. But there I had specifics to do. I had to do a painting of Mr. Kennedy walking on the beach as a young, romantic figure, supposedly receiving inspiration. My ideas of Kennedy are hardly those ideas. I'm not going to take that any further, but he certainly was idealized. So I did the idealized portrait of Kennedy strolling on the beach, rather like Socrates. And I had to do some designs of harbors and dry-docks that were a little more abstract. And I couldn't make them too abstract or they wouldn't be palatable to the conservative element in the Navy. But they are fairly abstract, angular studies of dry-docks and cranes. These paintings were all fairly large, and we couldn't get them on the ship stretched. And I had to get student help and take the canvases on the ship, make the stretchers in the room, take the lumber and everything there with me, and stretch the canvases and install them in the room - there were two rooms. It was rather interesting to carry these rolls of painted canvas on the ship and to unroll them there in the wardroom, which was being remodeled, and have all the comments from all sorts of enlisted men who were carpenters, who were working. And then when they had dinner or lunch, the crew of the ship would take a look and all talk to me and give their opinions. And it was amusing and interesting. I really prefer just working instead of having fancy commissions.

James: In 1974 the Board of Visitors named you an Eminent Scholar, and the following year you were appointed as the Louis I. Jaffe Professor of Art. Of all of your awards and honors, which one has meant the most to you as an artist?

Sibley: Well, I think that the Eminent Scholar is a laugh because I'm no more a scholar than I am Tarzan. I'm just not an intellectual and a scholar. I'm a painter and an educator in my field, and I suppose loosely that would fall into the idea of scholarship because it's a university. But to me a scholar is a person who does very painstaking intellectual research, very well ordered and persistently follows a chain of research in a particular direction, exploring and finding something new. The scholar who can't spell properly, who knows no foreign languages, who has difficulty with his bank account because my mathematics isn't what it ought to be -

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I can't conceive of myself as being called a scholar much less an eminent scholar. But I will say that the Louis Jaffe Professor and Eminent Scholar event meant a great deal to me, an awful lot to me, from the stand point of the school doing something for me, saying "Thank you," you might say, or the recognition that they wanted to bestow on me. I was very, very touched by it, and I think that it did mean very much. Of the awards that I've had, believe it or not, the one that meant the most to me was a little silver bowl that I got for being voted the most outstanding teacher at ODU about six years ago. It was done as a surprise by a sorority. They give this award every year. And I had no idea of receiving this honor. And I went to the thing with some kids; they had dragged me to it, and I realized afterwards why. It was in the stadium. And when they called me to receive this, I was in a state of shock, and it meant a great deal to me, and I will always treasure that memory very much. And, you know, I can't remember the name of the sorority that does this very nice thing. It's downstairs in my dining room, the cup is. But it is a sorority at the college. And, Lord knows, I should remember the name.

James: I've seen those awards given out, but I can't remember the name either. Many people in Tidewater believe you to be the one most responsible for the "art boom" in the area. In your opinion, how does Tidewater compare with other large urban areas as a center for the artistic movement?

Sibley: Well, the idea that I'm most responsible for the "art boom" is some journalist's thought; it's not in any way a - I'm not trying to be false -- show a lot of false modesty or anything; this is just not the facts. I think that there has been resurgence in interest in art throughout the United States in the past decade, and it would happen regardless of who happened to be in a community. So far as large areas as opposed to artistic centers, I had mentioned earlier in my comments the fact that Europe is influenced by Paris, that we imitate – I'm sorry. That New York is imitating Paris often times or imitating Rome. The European art centers are imitated by New York, are imitated by Sidney, Australia. And we in turn imitate New York. I think that it's all a watering down from centers into smaller areas. I think that the problems and the concern, the activity of self expression is identically the same, regardless of where

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you go in the world. The question is one which I don't really get too very much in my mind because, I suppose, a layman may think there are... It's rather like the boy from Iowa whose parents send him to Paris to study. And he's supposed to make good because he goes to Paris and is exposed to the Louvre. There are people in remote areas who do much more than many, many people who spend their lifetime in art centers. Creativity can't be pigeonholed and measured by its geographic limits. And being exposed to stimulating monuments to the best art of the past is wonderful, but it's no assurance of anything. What's inside is really what causes artistic development to occur. And community-wise, I think this is just as true there as it is - big city, little city. It's just on a different level.

James: What are some of the major changes you have witnessed in the 21 years you have been associated with ODU?

Sibley: The size of the school certainly has dramatically changed. In my first years here we were told that we must wear a jacket and tie. We had to on the campus in those days. It's hard to realize that now. Along with being able to stop by the President's office and break in, the fact that we could all get together in one little room and talk. We were very close. At the same time we were much more a part of the… what was then, I suppose, the educational conventions than we are now. If I went to school with a jacket and tie, the kids would say, "Charles, where are you going?" They'd wonder what was up. Why am I dressed that way instead of in my jeans? I think that the size of the school and some of the superficial patterns are significant. But the most significant change, and it is not superficial, is the real change that has taken place in the young people in the past twenty years. Twenty years ago the college student was much more of a conformist, doing what he was supposed to do, behaving in a preconceived way, not trying to search and find that which was real to the individual. The people I work with now are much more serious, much less, without the Ivy League attitudes, more apt to call a spade a spade and to resent those people who don't call a spade a spade. They don't want to hide behind anything. They don't show a lot of silly respect. But if you make them work hard, stimulate them to work hard, the respect is almost automatic, in most cases. I'm very refreshed and very happy with the caliber

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of the students in the past few years as compared to the kind of student who I encountered in colleges two decades ago.

James: Could you discuss some of your personal aspirations for the future of art at ODU?

Sibley: They are very much like the aspirations that I've always had. I still think there should be more contact with students in other departments. I'd like to see some courses evolve which are team taught, which are held in large auditoriums, which deal with contemporary art, art in daily life today, courses that are so good and so popular that the word gets out and that the enrollment is just automatic, where you have three hundred people in an auditorium and turn them away every semester. I think this would do the art department a great deal of good, and I think it would do the students a great deal of good. And these courses can be planned and taught if we just go ahead and do it. There was a time when this couldn't happen, but it's what we need now; it's much more contact with people outside of the art department. That may sound rather odd in plans for the art department to move outside the art department. I'm not certainly in any way trying to recruit an art major. I don't want that. But I would like to have the engineering student, the pre-med student, the law student a little more aware of the place of art in their lives. And this can only be done if they take courses or one course, at least, in which they look and learn to look.

James: What role do you believe art should play in undergraduate education?

Sibley: That's just about what I was saying before that. I think that's the role it should play. I think that there is a responsibility toward the gifted and toward the seriously inclined person to become an artist. The place of the artist in contemporary society is very questionable. It's changing and it's in a state of flux. We do have responsibility in trying to prepare these people to enter the field. But I think our real primary role is to continue the role and to get a more exciting and stronger position for the liberal arts student in exposing him to art, that plus a graduate program, which I think is being evolved right now. We will have to have a graduate program at ODU; we need it. But that's four people in a field. I still feel a greater responsibility toward the large mass of students than I do toward either the graduate or the undergraduate art major.

James: Well that's it.

FINIS

Interview Information

See also Obituary from Virginian-Pilot.

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