BRINGING OUT THE ARTISTIC MUSE OF YOUTH\ HOME CLASSES KEEP ROOM FOR CREATIVITY

Author(s): Jerry Taylor, Globe Staff Date: February 20, 2000 Page: 13 Section: Northwest Weekly

LEXINGTON - The dining room table in Sirarpi Heghinian Walzer's house was filled one afternoon last week with young artists and their creations - collage portraits, abstract paintings, sketches, calendars, greeting cards, CD covers, still lifes.

Two members of this once-a-week studio - Hannah Mackenzie-Margulies, 10, and Walzer's daughter, Tania, 11 - engaged in a good-natured mini-critique of collage portraits they had done of each other earlier. "I don't have red hair," Hannah said.

"I don't have a pink face, either," Tania said. Since the fall of 1998, Tania's mother, an artist, has devoted two afternoons a week to sharing the joys of her profession with children ages 5 to 11.
Walzer began with youngsters near her home on Fulton Road, near the Woburn line. Now she has 16 students, enough to divide the younger ones into two groups. A part of the increase in demand may result from the town, looking to save money, having eliminated art classes in kindergarten this school year.

"We learn from each other," said Walzer, whose older child, Philipp, 12, a seventh-grader at Diamond Middle School, had joined the class this day.

"They know what they want. They can say, `No, I don't want that color there.' I don't force them to do anything, although there are some exercises," the artist said.

One figure, a 12-inch wooden manikin named Fred, "has to be standing, for example," Walzer said.

"Art gives them a new way of expressing themselves. It's important that children don't always feel they're being graded. In a way, there is no standard in art. It's all relative. Picasso was not accepted for a long time."

Students - and three of their parents who stopped to drive them home - seemed unanimous in preferring Walzer's approach, more coaching than traditional teaching, to that at the Fiske and Hastings schools, where all the older children are enrolled.

"Here we do it our own way," said Bethany Lowe, 11, a fifth-grader at Fiske who also takes cello lessons. "We have more freedom."
Her mother, Sally Russell, said, "Art classes in school are cookie-cutter art. Teachers make the kids' pictures look like theirs. Sirarpi pulls the artist out of the child. Plus, the kids have a good time."

Walzer, 41, is of Armenian descent, and was born in Syria. She came to the United States at age 13 and graduated from Watertown High School in 1975. At Boston University she earned a bachelor's degree in biomedical-electrical engineering, and a master's in systems engineering. She and her husband, Winfred, lived and worked in Berlin for 13 years before settling in Lexington two years ago.

An exhibit of Walzer's monotypes and mixed media works at the Depot Square Gallery in Lexington continues through next Sunday.
The other students in the older group are Minttu Koivunen, 10, Alice Berners-Lee, 9, Nicole Taylor, turning 11 this week, all at the Fiske, and Hadley Kyle, 9, a Hastings fourth-grader.

"They don't have an art room at Fiske or that many materials," said Hannah, who is also studying flute and dance. "Here you have more room to work on things."

One of Hannah's abstract works went onto a plastic-foam sheet with acrylics, and then was transferred onto paper. "That's a tree, with vines and leaves," she said in showing a visitor the painting, in ochre, reds, blues, white and orange. "I used to think it was a monkey, but now I don't."

All of Walzer's art students maintain portfolios, some beginning at 3 years old. Among dozens of paintings and drawings in the class were Tania's Christmas card with facing doves and Minttu's watercolor of tulips against an aqua and green background.
"We have more stuff here and can do more things," Minttu said.
Art classes for preschoolers and older are also offered in Lexington at the Munroe Center for the Arts, in Arlington at the Arlington Center for the Arts, in Reading at Creative Arts, in Concord at the Emerson Umbrella for the Arts, in Lawrence at the Essex Art Center, and at Littleton's Hands-On Museum.

But Walzer's classes, which cost $10 per session, including materials, have an informality and flexibility that few community centers can match.
In warmer weather, Walzer and the children use her family's former two-car garage, now her studio; sometimes her students will set up shop on the family's driveway. Sometimes they'll draw flowers she has let them pick in her back yard.

After the 90-minute class for the older children had ended, Walzer's neighbor, Elissa Hatton, brought over her 7-year-old daughter, Olivia, and two other Fiske students, Vanessa Zarba, 6, and Kaitlin Sparrow, 7.
"We learn a lot," Olivia said. "We draw a lot of things."
From her portfolio she pulled a painting of a futuristic-looking structure that she said was her dream house, and one of a sitting brown dog, for which the model had been the Walzer family's golden retriever, Bumper.

"Here she learns how to look at things and see shapes and dimensions," Olivia's mother said. "Sirarpi encourages all the children to express themselves creatively. That's important at this age."

Kaitlin displayed her charcoal sketch of an apple, beside a vase holding a flower with pink, violet and red blossoms.

And Vanessa plucked from her portfolio a painting of a sunflower against a blue-green sky, its yellows and oranges as vivid as anything by Georgia O'Keeffe.