Kindred’s spirit UMFK professor Wendy Kindred retires to concentrate on art and writing

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Wendy Kindred’s future is largely a blank canvas.

That’s the way the recently retired Kindred, who taught art for 28 years at the University of Maine at Fort Kent, likes it.

“With painting, you never know what’s going to come next,” Kindred said during a recent interview at her Fort Kent home. “I think of painting as exploratory. I want to open that up again. As a teacher, you have to keep things under control. A class is never as exploratory for the teacher as for the students. I need to become the student again.”

Kindred is now settling into retired life, having packed up and brought home many boxes from her former office and classroom (unpacking will happen eventually). Now it’s time to concentrate on her writing and her art.

Kindred, who has continued to paint throughout her teaching career, sees the two as being in conflict with one another.

“When you teach for a long time, you become less of an artist,” she explained. “If you’re a teacher, you have to be diverse. As an artist, you have to focus, to the exclusion of other things. Those two efforts war against each other.”

Why retire now?

“I’m the right age,” said Kindred simply. “It’s my turn. There’s a lot of things I want to do that are both facilitated and interrupted by teaching. So I thought I’d take advantage of [retirement].”

In her time at UMFK, a school that doesn’t have an art major, Kindred taught 3,072 students in 232 classes, mostly art, but also honors seminar courses, education, English and humanities.

“When you teach at an undergraduate, liberal-arts institution, you have to be broader than your field,” she said. “You have to help students make connections. As a student, you take a little bit of this, a little bit of that. In the real world, they all hook up.”

Scott Voisine, now the college’s director of student services, was one of those students. An art minor who became a certified high school art teacher, Voisine fondly recalls what the woman whom he considers a professional and artistic mentor taught him.

“I learned how to overcome my own biases and experiment, to become a better artist,” he said. “I learned to challenge myself, to break my own paradigms of thinking and to look at a situation from different perspectives to better understand it. She taught me how to think, how to dig deeper into whatever I was doing. She was a real academic, and she taught me to be one as well. It’s helped me as an administrator, in the way I do my job now.”

As an artist, Kindred said she starts “painting and see what happens.” Her teaching style follows a similar path.

“It’s very improvisational,” she said. “I wait to see what students bring into class. I give them a little start, see what they produce, then go from there. I try to carry everyone along, so I have to know what they’re doing to carry everyone along. My agenda is not very firm in the beginning; who’s in the class will determine a lot. I start with good intentions, then I have to figure out how to get everything on track.”

Priscilla Daigle, a public school teacher for 35 years, took several classes from Kindred on her way to her fine-arts certification. She had nothing but praise for her longtime friend.

“She wants to transcend the ordinary and get her students to do the same,” said Daigle, now an adjunct faculty member at UMFK. “She brings people out of themselves, and gets them to exceed their own thoughts about what they can do, gets them to stretch.”

Like those of many would-be art majors, Kindred’s parents urged her to learn to teach as well. She taught for two years at the high school level and two years at an art school in Ethiopia, where she lived from 1964 to 1969 and where her twin daughters, Audrey and Jessica, were born. That was her background when she came to Fort Kent in 1973, after deciding that making a living as an artist wasn’t feasible.

Kindred considers everything in life to be part of a total process. That being said, she divided her time in Fort Kent into three periods.

The first ran from 1973 to 1982, as her school-age children grew: “It’s a wonderful place to raise kids,” she said. “They loved it here.”

The second went from 1983 to 1991, as the professor came to appreciate what she had at UMFK.

“I had much more mobility [than she would have had at a larger institution],” she said. “Fort Kent became a wonderful springboard to the rest of the world. I got involved with Ethiopian politics, and did a lot of writing for the opposition to the military junta. I traveled a great deal, and this gave me an opportunity to do that.”

She went on a travel grant to Ethiopia in 1985, at the height of that country’s famine. After her return, she taught an honors course in African literature and wrote about Ethiopian art, “to keep myself academically credible,” she said with a smirk.

Since then, “at some point, it gets too late to move,” she said. “You get too caught up in the local context after that.”

Besides, UMFK had grown comfortable for Kindred: “I felt like I owned the place. This is a place where you could do what you wanted to do in your life, where you could expand your role. I brought a lot of people to campus that I wanted to expose students to, that I wanted to know better myself. I got to go to conferences which I felt were exciting.”

Whatever Kindred got out of being at UMFK, she gave back, and more. First, there’s the honors program, which she was involved with since she got to campus and directed for a number of years.

“In art, you have to visually look at everything,” she said. “The honors program gives you a chance to broaden your field. I’ve always had trouble containing my interests.”

Before her arrival at UMFK, Kindred had written four children’s books. She continued her literary pursuits by editing the college’s Black Fly Review for 15 years, which got her involved with writing poetry and short fiction. Some of her work was published in small literary journals.

Kindred also helped out by serving on a number of committees.

“She was highly involved, and had a lot of campus service,” Voisine said. “Wendy was one of those people who asked questions and made others think hard.”

For Kindred, the hardest part of teaching at UMFK, since the college offered only an arts minor, was the fact she was often starting over with new students each semester.

“I was usually teaching people who were entering my subject area for the first time,” she said. “I knew what to expect, and that gets redundant. I could anticipate student needs. I was feeding them ideas from my own work, and they’d get cannibalized and reduced.”

Because of society’s perception of art, many students hadn’t drawn since first or second grade, Kindred said.

“In our culture, we have an incredible media reproductive technology,” she explained. “For a vast number of images, we only need a few artists. We don’t believe so much in our images; we want measurable things. We think of art as something frivolous, something for leisure time.

“It’s not a question of [children having artistic] talent, it’s a question of cultivating human capability, and we don’t cultivate those very well,” she added.

Many students come into her classes without much of an idea about art.

“They’ll say, ‘I’d love to be able to express myself,'” she said. “But that’s a very small part of art. It’s expressing ideas, perceiving space and objects and the relationships between them, and trying to capture that. We take a very narrow view of art, that it’s about me, me, me.”

If art is personal, is there such thing as bad art? Kindred certainly believes so.

“There are factual things to learn: techniques, principles, vocabulary,” she said. “You have to be able to handle those things, and it becomes pretty apparent if you can’t handle them at all. You do have to know the territory somewhat, so you can work with it effectively. Also, you can tell when artwork has a soul and when it’s just the filling of surfaces.”

When she has had time to work on her own art, Kindred has been painting mostly still lifes and portraits.

“It’s my way of teaching myself again how to look at things,” she said in her upstairs studio, showing portraits of her daughter, Audrey, her 96-year-old father and a series of white pitchers. “When I can’t pull anything out of myself, I better have something in front of me when I paint. But when I’m looking at something, I get very literal. I have to get away from the model to stretch.”

Later this winter or early spring, she’ll embark on a planned writing project in Ethiopia. She’ll be translating the works of writer Sebhat Gebre Egciabher, whom she has known since the ’60s, from the native language of Amharic to English.

“I live to travel, but right now, I’m just doing this specific mission,” she said.

Studies will go on at UMFK, but without Kindred.

“We’ll miss her,” Daigle said. “She added a texture to the university community that was unique, and I don’t think it can be replaced.”