The New Era
Gabe Fernandez had flashbacks of his days as a student at Hawthorne Elementary as he walked toward the classroom full of students waiting to meet him Monday morning, Feb. 2.
Fernandez, who attended Hawthorne between 1977 and 1984, stopped by to chat with a group of fourth- and fifth-graders about his artwork and the perseverance it took to become a full-time artist.
The room full of students quietly sketched while they waited for Fernandez to arrive.
When he entered the room, it was the first thing he noticed.
“I’m seeing that some of you have art folders,” Fernandez said.
He pointed to Jaidone Rice’s sketch of a chair.
“That’s really good,” he told the beaming student.
Teachers Carla Alexander and Willa Martin prepped their classes well – they studied Fernandez’s artwork and created some of their own. Fernandez took time after his talk to look at and discuss each student’s artwork.
Because most of Fernandez’s paintings and drawings focus on chairs, that is what the students practiced.
“You poor guys had to draw a bunch of chairs,” Fernandez said, chuckling.
He asked if anyone found that subject boring. One student ’fessed up.
“I picked the chair because it was something not everybody was focusing on,” Fernandez said. “I wanted to find something fresh.”
A student asked him about the first chair he ever painted.
The first time he painted a chair, he was working at a homeless shelter for teenagers in Portland, he said.
“The kids would come in and it would be chaos,” Fernandez said. “When they went to bed, they’d been busy all day long, so they would just fall asleep. And then everything went from this (high) energy level to dead silence.”
It was during a moment of silence that Fernandez saw that chair in the corner.
“To me, it was just peace. It was quiet stillness is what I like to describe it as,” Fernandez said. “It was beautiful and I drew it and I knew right at that very moment that I could draw interior spaces, whether its chairs, windows, couches, tables, beds I didn’t care.”
That was 15 years ago.
Fernandez left the job at the homeless shelter and worked at St. Mary’s Home for Boys in Portland for 13 and half years before he resigned in June to work as an artist full time.
His work has turned heads, including exhibitions at the Linda Hodges Gallery in Seattle and the Schomburg Gallery in Los Angeles.
He told the Hawthorne students that being accepted by a top gallery is akin to a football player making the NFL.
St. Mary’s provided another link for Fernandez to Hawthorne Elementary. During his time at St. Mary’s, he worked with Jordan Augustadt – Hawthorne Principal Terry Augustadt’s son. They were assistant managers in the evenings.
The elder Augustadt saw an episode of Oregon Public Broadcasting’s “Oregon Art Beat” last fall that featured Fernandez, and that got the ball rolling toward inviting him to speak at the school.
The Hawthorne students asked Fernandez to demonstrate some techniques for them on the overhead projector.
He started with a sphere and ended up sketching one of the students, and of course, a chair.
“There’s a good chance that chair was here when I went here and that’s what I’m going to be thinking about while I’m drawing this,” Fernandez said.
While he sketched, Fernandez reminisced with the students and staff about his former teachers.
There were no art classes when Fernandez attended Hawthorne and it wasn’t something that was integrated into other lessons in the way some teachers are doing it now.
Fernandez got his earliest art lessons from a local retired artist.
“A guy on Riggs Hill, a retired artist (John Hillman), saw my picture in The New Era,” Fernandez said.
Fernandez had been named Artist of the Month in high school.
“He saw my picture in the paper and called my parents,” Fernandez said.
They made a deal: Fernandez mowed Hill’s lawn and did other chores and Hill taught Fernandez about art.
“The first thing he told me is ‘You gotta get out of Sweet Home. You gotta get out and see the world,’” Fernandez said.
So when he graduated, Fernandez moved to Eugene until, he said, Eugene was too small. Then he moved to Portland and went to art school. He also traveled to New York and Europe.
Flashbacks kept coming for him Monday at his old school.
“This is where I had first grade – right here,” he told Augustadt as they walked down a hallway. “Wow, this looks just like it did when I was here. This is freaking me out.”
Later, walking by the playground, he saw more familiar sights.
“Those poles were installed for the tetherball when I was here,” he said, pointing to some well-worn equipment. “That was a huge deal.”
Before the visit to Hawthorne was over, another request came his way. A student asked Fernandez to do a painting of the front of Hawthorne Elementary.
“I’m walking through and I’m just having this real rush of memories, all the fun times that I had here,” Fernandez said. “It’s a rush. And that’s why, when you say like, draw the front of the school – I mean, heck yeah, because it means something to me. I’ll put my heart and soul into it if I do that.”