About Sherry Bryant |

At TDS we are all mourning the recent and sudden death from complications of cancer of one of our most charismatic and valuable teachers, Sherry Bryant.*

Sherry began her relationship with The Drawing Studio as many people do, as an advocate for our studio programs, as a donating associate, as an exhibiting artist in our Small Wonders Shows, and as a participant in our senior (OATS) program. Her extraordinary art gifts led her teacher, Judy Nakari to introduce her to OATS director Pat Dolan as a potential teacher, and although Sherry had little or no teaching experience, she started assisting Judy, and eventually when Judy could not continue, took over the class.

Before long, thanks to the enthusiasm of her students, she was teaching watercolor and drawing classes at the Forum, an outreach satellite program run by TDS.

The Northwest Explorer (a regional newspaper) wrote an article** talking about her and her students and their success at becoming a family of learners. When the grant money ran out that group of students opted to continue together on their own.

Meanwhile by 2013 when one of our long time watercolor teaching artists retired, and we asked Sherry to begin teaching watercolor in our regular professional adult program. In no time her courses had a large following of new and repeating students.

While I was very aware of our faculty enthusiasm for Sherry’s teaching, I did not know her well enough to identify the qualities in her art teaching that engendered such inordinate enthusiasm from her students. Her unexpected death left me not just sad but resigned to live with that curiosity unanswered.

That is, until I attended a family memorial a few days after her death, at which a progression of her students and co-teachers stepped to the front of the chapel to tell with anecdotes and love about their personal gratitude to Sherry. And for an hour, I lived in the center of Sherry’s presence as a teacher. Because what each speaker had to say was from a much deeper level than simple grief, it was to thank her for showing them where and how to find their own unique art life.

In a word, Sherry was a living example of the art process we want The Drawing Studio to bring to every person who comes to us, a process far beyond the teaching issues of art learning, technical skills, etc. Her colleagues—students, teachers and friends told how Sherry could identify that permanent and specific core of creativity that lives in each person, and then reflect it back to them in a way that makes it accessible forever after. That was what each speaker wanted to thank Sherry for.

As the main founder of TDS, I know that much of our success depends upon our core family of teaching artists who know how to speak into the creative center of ordinary people. What was new that I learned as I listened to Sherry’s students speak about what she gave them was the origin of that skill. Sherry’s simple power came from her trust in her own personal journey, because as mentioned before, she came to us largely self-taught as both artist and teacher. Which means she did not have much of the baggage one picks up in art schools about art as a ‘career’. This left her free to explore her own personal motivations for making art.

Pat Dolan and I recently talked about how the intensely personal style of Sherry’s art also reflects her larger karma, a long-standing devotion to animals as belonging to our family of sentient beings. The ultimate authenticity of any art is the way one’s inner values give birth to each person’s hard-won visual vocabulary and style. I say ‘hard-won’ because it takes time and practice to find one’s own way in a world that is always telling you what to do. So it should not be surprising that Sherry could find the art core in her students, the one that connects the outer world with a person’s inner values. Once in place that connection fires up the passion that is the art engine of each person’s drive to make her art a mirror of her experience.

Thank you, Sherry
for all you have given all of us at TDS.