Art For All

Fine Arts Teacher Brian Schroyer sees in every student an artist in the making

BY KATE DUNLOP

Brian Schroyer P’22 has taught in the Arts Department at St. Paul’s School since 1999.

That’s more than half his lifetime.

It’s a milestone that can be attributed in part to the influence of his parents, who recognized and fully encouraged his artistic abilities early on, and of a high school art teacher who deputized him as a teaching assistant his senior year and later mentored him during his student teaching days. It is a powerful testament when a student looks at a teacher and thinks, I want to be just like her someday, but that is the power of a teacher: to shape and change futures.

And that is the power Schroyer wields so well, as he teaches drawing, ceramics and web design. In the studio, he lives for the “aha moments,” when a student grasps a concept. Buzzing around his one-room schoolhouse of an art studio, with four levels of drawing students working side by side, he uses examples, metaphors and similes — anything that will help students tumble an idea over in their brains until, like a Rubik’s cube, it clicks and falls into place.

In Schroyer’s studio, everyone has potential: If you have the ability to dress yourself and can navigate a room full of furniture without injuring yourself, he says, you have all the cognitive ability and dexterity necessary to draw — and to draw well. The rest of it is tips, tricks and techniques that he will share, along with his permission to make a mess and fail and to learn from that because seeing what doesn’t work is just as valuable as seeing what does.

“I have had one to three sections of Drawing I every term for 25 years, and I’m not sick of it because spending time with those students, that’s where the gains are most rapid,” Schroyer says. “I have to assume that everyone has zero experience and I tell them, “If you’re not here of your own free will, don’t tell me. Just give me one week and we’ll see.’ They begin to believe in themselves and are willing to try much more ambitious projects. We’ve had visiting artists who say there’s no way I can be asking high school students to do certain things; then they see the results and can’t believe it.”

Schroyer grew up the oldest of five children in Vermont, studied studio art at Brigham Young University and art education at the University of Vermont, then earned an MFA at Lesley University. He was teaching on Nantucket when his sister, Carrie Johnson ’02, started at SPS and their mother encouraged him to look into teaching at private schools. His first year at SPS was Carrie’s second, and they saw each other every day.

Like own high school mentor, Schroyer has seen students go on to become teachers themselves. He’s mentored Penn Fellows. And he’s had former students return to share the many ways in which he has shaped and changed their futures.

Last summer, his middle daughter, Kayla ’22, who took drawing at SPS and is now at Brigham Young learning in the same studios where her father once created art, returned to Millville as an Advanced Studies Program teaching intern in his Studio Arts class. Art has long bonded the duo.

“Kayla sat right in front of me in chapel her first year, so we saw each other every day. The next year, she was all the way down at the other end and I could barely see her, so I got into the practice of leaving a drawing in her seat every day. Sometimes they were quick sketches and sometimes, after being on duty for three hours, they’d be pretty detailed. It was art every day, a way to be accountable to somebody else to produce art.”

After 26 years, Schroyer still finds his chosen path tremendously rewarding. And SPS? Well, it very much feels like home, with his family and his career right here.