The Independent



August 3, 2006
Independent Newspaper
July 2006
Independent Magazine


lastnext

Livermore Artist Finds Path
to Creative Renewal
through Teaching

Text by Patricia Koning
Photos by Doug Jorgenson


Mark Oatney is a photographer, artist, and songwriter. His photos have been published in National Geographic and Nikon’s international promotions, and he has been profiled in American Photo, Foto Magazine, Outdoor Photographer, and Musarium.

The Livermore native is also the art teacher at the Livermore Valley Charter School (LVCS). Over the last school year he shared his passion for art and technical skill with 482 students in grades 1-6.

As part of the LVCS staff, Oatney has come full circle. His first experience teaching art came in the fourth grade at Sonoma Elementary School, which was located in the same facility LVCS now calls home. Encouraged by his fourth-grade teacher Mrs. Moreland, Oatney taught art to second graders at the school.

He ran into Mrs. Moreland again a few years ago. It was the first time he’d seen her since Sonoma Elementary.

“She asked if I was an artist,” he says. “It was very reaffirming. She was the first teacher to give me free rein to explore my creativity.”

Mrs. Moreland was the first in a series of teachers and professors that would guide Oatney down his path to becoming a professional photographer and eventually a teacher. He developed a love of the outdoors in Mr. Carlson’s field biology class at Granada High School, which was further reinforced by working in the arboretum at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC).

He began studying art while a UCSC student under printmaker Don Weygandt and photographer Norman Locks. Oatney credits these professors with instilling in him the values that later led him into education.

“Don taught me that art is a conversation between the generations,” says Oatney.

He graduated from UCSC with a B.A. in Biology and worked to protect the northern spotted owl under the employment of Oregon State University, U.S Fish and Wildlife Services, the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, and other agencies. The final year of this work involved massive hikes through roadless areas. Oatney began racing around the woods with his camera, shooting anything that caught his eye.

“Hiking so much at night looking for owls inspired me to start doing all-nighters once a month, during full moons, hiking around shooting landscapes lit only by the light of the moon,” he recalls.

He showed his first 10 rolls of film to John Barger, a large format landscape photographer, who encouraged him to pursue his photography. When a botany job fell through, Oatney secured a position working for renowned nature photographer Frans Lanting.

He learned much about both the artistic and business side of photography from both Lanting and his general manager Steve Kurtz. Despite the opportunity to work with one of the masters of nature photography, Oatney was frustrated that his style of photography didn’t fit into the world where Lanting had made his mark.

He had a revelation in a color photography class at Cabrillo College when instructor Don Vecchi showed an expressive, artistic photo of his blurry hands.

“It was a huge relief to see that I didn’t need to change what I was doing, that you could see photography as poetry,” he says. “I stopped worrying about the fact that my photography didn’t fit into anyone else’s mold.”

He submitted his work to stock agencies to an enthusiastic response. Oatney left his job with Lanting to focus on his own work.

He created his portfolio in a six month frenzy of work. He worked day and night, getting by on a few hours of sleep. The hard work soon paid off with publication in National Geographic and profiles that called him out as an emerging talent.

But the success came at a great cost. About a year after his work appeared on the national scene, he suffered debilitating tendonitis in both wrists. The affliction was brought on by too much time spent hunched over a computer, punctuated by weekend warrior-style photo trips that involved dragging around a couple of hundred pounds of gear and film in exotic locales like India and Africa.
The tendonitis lasted a year and a half. During the worst of it, Oatney was unable to hold a book open long enough to read, needed both arms to lift a spoon, and could barely open a doorknob.

“It was a sobering period. Having my body crash forced me to examine the worth of what I was doing,” he explains.

Reconnecting with nature helped him recover. To fight boredom, he took to riding his bike around town, hands-free. After a few weeks of longer and faster bike rides, he began having symptom-free days.
As he searched for more meaning in his work, teaching was an obvious choice. In fact, it was the path not taken; he’d been accepted to the UCSC Master Program in Education before landing the job with Lanting.

“For as long as I’ve know Mark, he’s struggled between art and science. It’s a left brain, right brain sort of thing,” says lifelong friend and fellow LVCS teacher Laura Morgan. “Teaching is the perfect answer.”

He began working at the El Cerrito Sylvan Learning Center, teaching math, reading, and test preparation to a range of students, including adults and disabled. He also worked in a Sylvan-related program teaching math remediation at troubled high schools in Oakland.

“It was intellectually intense and very rewarding,” Oatney says. “I would wake up in the middle of the night thinking about my job with a smile on my face.”

He was considering a career in academia when Morgan told him that LVCS was looking for an art teacher. He’s approached teaching with the same passion he applied to photography.
“Mark did a tremendous job as a first year teacher,” says LVCS Principal Tina Morris. “he truly loves working with children. He wants to make a huge impact—in terms of art, self-esteem, success, and character.”

To culminate the school year, Oatney organized a school-wide art show in which every student displayed one piece of art created in his class. The result was a stunning array of pencil sketches, water colors, collages, photographs, chalk drawings, and other media ranging from the abstract to the realistic.

At the art show, which was held on the same day as the science fair, Oatney facilitated the sixth grade students in a debate on the topic “If an Up was a Down.” The students bantered ideas on reconstructing the new reality, which led to discussions about physics, cosmology, and inventions.

The debate came about from an idea Oatney introduced to his older classes.

“One morning I woke up with the phrase in my head, what if an up was a down? So I broached the subject in some of my classes,” he explains.

The result was a phenomenal outpouring of creativity. The ideas the students came up with ranged from inventions for dealing with the reversal of gravity to drawings of how upside down might look. Sixth-grader Brenton Arndt came up with the theory that the phenomena was caused by globs of oatmeal congealing in space, passing through a universal microwave, and thereby hardening.

Oatney cites the up/down debate as just one example of how his students amaze him. He says children don’t have the same critical or comparative instinct that often limits the creativity of adults and that everything is fresh and new to them.

As an art teacher, he hopes to instill in his students the importance of rhyming colors and patterns to unify a piece of art, the ability to use squinting to see and correct weaknesses in their own work, and to use an open mind when evaluating each other’s work. Just as it is impossible to say if Picasso or Van Gogh is better, he wants his students to understand they can’t make the same comparisons with their peers.

Now, at the end of his first year as an elementary art teacher, Oatney says he’s more creatively free than ever. Without the pressure to make it big as a photographer, he s gotten back into painting, other media, art history, and his first love, songwriting.

“I originally thought photography would be my day job to support songwriting,” he says. “Now it is very energizing not to worry so much about making money through art—I can do art or music just for me.”

He hasn’t left photography behind; he’s just changed his approach. He still spends a lot of time in nature taking photographs. Over spring break he traveled through Baja California and he’ll visit Vietnam next winter. He still sells his photographs to the stock agencies, but on his terms.

“I think I’ll always be a teacher,” he says. “I like being part of the lineage of art education with these students.”