Graham Browne’s Forte Prep welcomes its first class of high schoolers.
May 12, 2023
Introducing Fine Arts Teacher and Art Team Co-coach Eugene Sarmiento
BY JACQUELINE PRIMO LEMMON
“Being a child, everyone draws and paints, and sometimes that stops by middle or high school,” says Fine Arts Teacher Eugene Sarmiento. “I kind of kept on at it.” And as a first-year faculty member in the St. Paul’s School Arts Department, he wants to make sure his students get the opportunity to keep at it, too.
Sarmiento sits at a table in one of the Fine Arts Building’s eight studios, surrounded by sketchbooks and pencils awaiting the students who will come in and pick up where they left off. He says he likes working with teenagers and young adults because it’s as much a time for personal transformation as it is a time for professional decision-making, and he knows firsthand that art can be a career as well as a fun form of self-expression.
“I was like, that art kid in school,” he says as he talks about the sketchbook he would carry around in high school. Art, especially drawing, is something he has always been passionate about, but by his freshman year of college he was certain that he wanted to pursue it full time. Sarmiento went on to earn his BFA in printmaking at the University of Texas-Arlington and his MFA in printmaking and drawing at the University of Kansas. His work has been displayed in galleries and exhibitions all over the country, primarily in the South and Midwest.
“I had great mentors and knew I wanted to pass on that information and knowledge. I wanted to open different avenues for students to look at themselves and the wide representation of artists and art genres,” Sarmiento says of the decision he made to teach art. “I am interested in blurring the separation of art and everyday life within my teachings while still promoting academic excellence in creating art.”
Last term, he taught Animation, Painting and an art history class focused on post-modern to contemporary art; this term, he’s teaching Painting as well as Art of the Sketchbook and Art History: Museum and Curatorial Studies. “One thing I talk a lot about in most of my classes is how human history and art history run parallel to each other, and they’re both a reflection of each other,” Sarmiento says.
St. Paul’s is a great opportunity to grow as an educator, especially since many commitments touch on aspects of living a holistic life beyond the classroom.”
Eugene Sarmiento, teacher of fine arts
In addition to teaching, Sarmiento is also co-coaching the first term of an afternoon visual arts pilot program known as the SPS Art Team.
The idea came from head of the Arts Department Leigh Kaulbach ’08, Sarmiento explains; the impetus being that creating an afternoon activity would give the School’s visual artists more time in the studio and additional exposure to galleries and studios beyond the grounds. Students in Art Team meet Monday through Friday, just like any other afternoon activity or club. Members participate in two group exercises a week and get plenty of time for solo work.
“Last week we did a still-life drawing where I brought in a bouquet of flowers and we all drew it together, and then we talked about it afterward,” Sarmiento says. “Then yesterday, the school photographer, Michael Seamans, brought over a couple of Polaroid cameras with film. The kids went and took snapshots and came back together as a group to talk about it. We usually only spend 30-45 minutes on the group activity, but yesterday’s took up the entire time. I think they enjoyed it a lot.”
Art Team, coached by both Sarmiento and Kaulbach and currently made up of only a handful of students, comes together regularly so team members can share what they have been working on. “We’ll have an impromptu or low-stakes critique,” Sarmiento says. “Not to be clichéd, but it’s more about the journey than the actual end product. If you can get to an end product that you like, then good, but at the same time, it’s a learning process.”
