Catch and Release : Bells Elementary School Art Teacher Retires After 32 Years of Reeling In and Inspiring Students
Every year for last 24 years at Bells Elementary School, five-year-olds (or 75-year-olds, for that matter) have had the same reaction when they entered the art room of Rich Herzog. Open-mouthed and rendered speechless, their eyes would dart around the room, taking in the visual explosion that Herzog had masterminded, giving him the reaction he had hoped for. After spending the first eight years at the school wheeling his “art-on-a-cart” from classroom to classroom, Herzog, a fine arts graduate of Indiana University of Pennsylvania, had a dream realized and received an art room to call his own. He spent the next two-plus decades outfitting it with a collection of Pez candy dispensers that grew to over 2,000, along with puppets and posters, Halloween costumes and robots, Egyptian sarcophagi, and colorful drawings, paintings and pottery.
“I used to tell people ‘One day, I am going to get an art room’,” Herzog said. “When it happened, I wanted people, especially kids, to come into my room and be greeted with a visual explosion. I wanted them to be excited, like walking into a circus or a zoo, minus the rings of fire and live animals. I wanted them to be inspired. I wanted them to learn art, of course, but I also wanted them to learn about artists. You need a good hook with kids. You gotta fish them in.”
So, Herzog found an angle to his angling.
“The internet is great for resources, but there is nothing like standing in front of a life-sized knight in shining armor and seeing the details, standing with it towering over you,” he said. “I am a touchy, feely artist, and I wanted my students to be too.”
Herzog outfitted his learning lab with toys - action figures that first drew him to his love of comic books- to teach the kids about how the body moves and how to animate it. He brought in plants and props so the students could paint still lives and look at how the plant took up a certain area, and the note the shadows that it threw, teaching them about three-dimensional components and textures.
“I tried bring in things that interested them because when I received them as kindergarteners or first graders, they would all draw stick figures – the head with the legs coming out of it, and arms coming out of the ears. I tried to direct them. They would say, ‘stick figures are easier,’ and I would say, ‘yeah, but this is nicer, and it looks more like you’.”
Words of encouragement to his budding artists always have emerged from Herzog’s mouth, but there were some things his students have never heard him say.
“Stay within the lines!” “Don’t make a mess!” “That doesn’t look the sample I showed you!”
“The messier it was sometimes, the better,” Herzog said, though he learned early on to have smocks or old t-shirts for his students to don to avoid calls from upset parents over wardrobe malfunctions. “And it’s nice to know that in art there is never a wrong answer. You may not have done exactly what I asked you to do, but you got close, so it’s not wrong. And even if you didn’t do what I asked you to do, but you did something that’s unique to you, and to me, then you did something right.”
Herzog loved storytelling and sparking imagination. He would have the students pretend that there was a trap door in the classroom and visually direct them down a make-believe ladder where they would see the different layers of the earth, and possibly fossils or gold. He would tell them stories from Greek mythology and have them envision what the characters looked like.
“Walking into Mr. Herzog's room was like walking into a museum,” Bells principal Ginny Grier said. “Art was everywhere! So many different kinds of art. You felt like you too could be an artist. It was just so inspiring!”
That is mostly what Herzog will miss, the results of his inspiration. The crazy things that kids said. What they created and came up with. The way they expressed themselves.
“There were times when this room was really noisy,” he said. “And there were times when this room was really quiet. And when it was really quiet, sometimes that was the best, because I knew they were thinking and creating. I tried to give a little magic. I tried to give them a different way of looking at things and to just share the joy. Art is not just the final product, it’s also the process. If you don’t have joy in the process, then you don’t like the product.”
And you don’t get to retire with amazing memories like Rich Herzog.
“Look what I did, Mr. Herzog! I did that,” he said with a satisfying smile. “When I see that, that’s when I know I’ve done something right.”
Bells fourth-grader Jackson Stewart stopped to wish Rich Herzog well on his last day of school.
Bells Elementary School art teacher Rich Herzog poses with his life-sized Egyptian sarcophagus that he created as part of a lesson.