Greg Cice: Making Art Part of his Life

By Julie D. Lillis: Four pieces of student artwork hang tacked to a white wall. Seven AP Studio art students lean forward on their stools, ready to have their work critiqued. Their teacher, Greg Cice, the Head of the Art Department, smiles, then turns serious.

"What do I plead with you to do on Critique Day?" The kids giggle nervously. "I want you to surprise me."

Greg lets that lesson settle in, then sweeps his brown hair off his forehead.

"If you surprise me, it means you've been inventive. It means you've been creative. This is not about getting a 5 on the AP [exam]. Art is about searching."

Pacing, he continues: "When you bring a piece in, bring a piece in that shows you've been looking for something."

When the bell rings, the kids will leave the studio with constructive suggestions-pooled from each other as well as from him-so that their pieces will be even better next time.

There is always a next time with Greg and his students. A quick peek inside the Upper School art studio (a former Hackley library of many years ago) and a visitor is stunned by the beauty of the artwork inside. Charcoal animals peer lifelike and oversize from walls, abstract oil paintings emerge from easels, still-life pencil drawings lie on tables-evidence of intermediate, advanced, and beginning art students. I told him that I found it impressive that we often send one senior a year to art school-quite good for a relatively small class. "It's very satisfying that every year it seems we do, that kids are going off to art school, or to study architecture." But it's equally impressive that kids who don't become professional artists are impacted positively by their experience at Hackley. "They continue making art," he says. "It becomes part of their lives."

The middle child of three brothers, Greg was reared in bucolic Ridgefield, Connecticut when that part of the world really was rural. Back then he leaned more to the athletic than artistic-"the Cice boys," as he refers to his family, played sports all the time--and it wasn't until college that he began defining himself as an artist. Equipped with a BFA from the University of Connecticut in 1985, Greg initially worked for a graphic designer while building up a "body of work" with which to apply to graduate school. But a career as a graphic artist wasn't his thing, and he left to apprentice himself to a master carpenter while still continuing to paint, in order to amass a portfolio with which to apply to graduate school. Greg learned how to build a house "from the ground up"-useful knowledge that would serve him later on in life. After a couple of years, portfolio in hand, he applied to Yale.

His acceptance to graduate school, where in 1990 he earned his MFA in Painting and Printmaking, proved to be a harbinger of good things to come. "Yale was brutal," he laughs. "But it was one of the most important and formative experiences in my life, certainly as an artist. Yale was really kind of trial by fire. It was really about survival, survival of your ideas, survival emotionally, survival psychologically. Basically they put you and your ideas and your work to the fire day in and day out and it was a matter of getting through."

We at Hackley have benefited from Greg's Yale training. Remember Critique Day? "Yale was all about articulating ideas, and trying to get to the conceptual root of what it is that you're exploring…If you're not investigating something, then there is no real art-just tasteful decoration, or ornamentation."

At Hackley, as at Yale, Greg wants his students to take what he calls "the journey" into art. "What is it that you're looking for, and how are you looking for it, and is it worthwhile looking for this in the first place?" These questions-asked in a different manner by Greg and by his AP students of each other-help the kids evolve into the advanced artists Greg feels they can be.

As Christine Gall '08 notes, "When I think of Mr. Cice as a teacher, the fact that he's always pushing you to make your own choices is something that really stands out. There are plenty of times when you'll ask him a question about the piece you're working on-'Is that shading there OK?' 'What do you think of that?' 'Am I done?'--and you'll never get a straight answer. He'll meet a question with a question: 'What do YOU think?' And once you tell him what you think, he'll just smile and walk away. It's infuriating sometimes, but it forces you to make creative decisions on your own based on what you feel is right, which is what a large part of what being on artist is. It makes you realize that you already know all of the answers to all of your questions, and that you already have the tools you need to create something."

For Hackley students, those tools begin in Lower School, continue through Middle School, and move on through the Advanced Placement level-the class I observed. (Greg teaches only in the Upper School.) Art is required in the Lower and Middle Schools, and a year of it in the Upper School satisfies the diploma requirement for graduation (a student must have either one year of art or performing arts). But from that the branches of the tree vary immensely. Kids might specialize-pursuing a passion for photography, for example-or continue on the track that leads them to the AP Studio Art course in their senior year. Or they might do both, "doubling up" in AP and another art course-and even creating their own, as one senior did this year with an Independent Study in Pastels. Our Independent Study program is uniquely positioned to suit the needs of blossoming young artists.

And so is Greg. We were lucky to find him, luckier still to grab him. He came to us in 1999, straight from working in Europe. He'd been teaching art first in Brussels at a St. John's School, then for five years at both the American School in Paris and Parsons School of Design (in Paris). At ASP he taught art history as well as "just about every other studio discipline-including ceramics, sculpture, and architecture"; at Parsons, he taught art history, theory, painting and drawing, and was a critic for senior studio students.

Hackley students benefit from the depth and breadth of his teaching experience. "One of the things I love about teaching here at Hackley is generally my experience has been that even with my most talented seniors, they're very open to hearing what you have to offer," Greg says. "A lot of the creative process is simply about being open."

And the kids, he says, relish a challenge: "One of the things that's really exciting about Hackley is the students here like a challenge. The higher you set the bar, the higher they reach…I think it's the whole culture of Hackley and the whole atmosphere of Hackley, that there's something worthwhile in reaching for something higher,…in the art studio, in the classroom, on the athletic fields. Good things happen when you reach for higher things."

 

Sierra Stewart '05--who is in art school at Cornell--thought so, too. "Every year Mr. Cice transforms a group of uncertain high-school students into portfolio-wielding artists. He empowers them with understanding of technical concepts such as perspective, proportion and contour. He challenges them to openly critique each other in a formal setting, developing a language with which to discuss their work, and the wisdom to separate criticism of an artwork from criticism of oneself."

This safe space means that kids think of the Upper School art studio as their own. As Sierra says, "Mr. Cice made me want to come to school in the morning. He turned the art room into 'my place,' left it open at night, and told me that I was always welcome. It was home and I never wanted to leave."

He has built and designed his own studio, as well as his own house (in which his personal art studio is housed). "I teach Architecture here at Hackley, so I was able to do that. I designed our house-from the ground up-and had my plans 'stamped' by a licensed engineer."

Then Greg began to build, putting his background in carpentry to good use. It took five years to build his house, working on the weekends and on vacations--with help from friends.

Designed to look like a barn from the outside, since ultimately there will be another house on the property, which Greg and his wife Brit are currently designing, this structure has enough room for a couple and their paintings. The house is a point of pride, a confluence of his interests in carpentry, architecture, painting, and design. (See photos.)

As in his house, lines are powerful forces in his paintings. "My paintings are very linear," he says. "They're essentially nothing more than broad fields of space and color-and when there is color, the color is typically subordinated to the drawing." He observes that his interest in linear work is probably "why I have always been drawn to carpentry and architecture."

Greg knows himself well, and says that, "I'm a very linear person. I have a very linear mind, so-with everything I do-I approach things singlemindedly, and I pursue one thing until I feel that I've exhausted it--and then I move on." Books are a perfect example, he says. "When I was living in Europe, I decided to work my way methodically through European history-starting with Polybius-and by the time I left I had reached the 19^th Century."

It follows logically that the man who reads voraciously also writes. His choice of genre? Writing film scripts. His first was a Western, "a kind of historical fiction," which involved spending "a lot of time in the New York Public Library researching characters."

"The second one is a script about beauty in all its aspects," he says. "It is set in Paris and was written in Paris. It is a love story, and is about the protagonist's search for beauty."

Now he is working on a script about a couple's becoming parents, a clear choice for someone whose wife delivered twins in late March.

"I've always loved film as an art medium," he says. "Screen writing came very naturally to me." While he laughs that it is "no fun" to watch a film with him-he is too critical, he says!-he also says that he finds it very interesting that he loves "storytelling" so much. "I've always loved storytelling, which is ironic because there is no narrative in my painting."

Music is another passion, as Greg's students can attest. He might be found playing his favorite tunes on a CD in the art studio, while his students work assiduously on their pieces. "Greg was always turning me on to great music in and out of the classroom," says Ben Miller '02, a professional musician whose band, The Low Anthem, you can hear on iTunes or in concert. "Tom Waits, Gillian Welch, Johnny Cash, Lucinda Williams, and quite a few more. Artists that have come to be influential in [my] song-writing and career as a musician."

Perhaps music greases the artistic wheels for these kids. "Art is not hobby-craft for Greg," says Ben. "He conveys the psychology of the creator with a seriousness that allows a fledgling artist to believe in art's infinite powers, and yet his wry humor keeps his vital convictions ever out of focus."

Greg believes that art should be accessible to everyone, those who are naturally gifted at art and those who think they are not. What would he say to the latter student? "The way I approach that situation is the way I really approach art: I try to think of art not only an as object, or as a noun, but as a verb.

"We tend to think of art as an object, or as a noun; in other words, art is a thing, an object, a picture hung on a wall." But, Greg says, that is not the way he wants art to be understood. "I tell my students, 'Art is also an activity. You do something to make art. You either build up marks on a page to make a drawing, or you build up colored marks on a canvas to make a painting. To do that requires time. It's a process. So if you can engage in that activity-that process--you're making art."

Practice, he insists, is critical, and just as important to an artist as it is to an athlete. "So turn off that judgmental voice, put it aside-and just make some marks. Just get into the activity of making art, and not worry about what's good or bad."

You can see, can't you, why one of his students told me, "And on top of being a great teacher, he's an all around nice person. There are only so many people that you'll meet in your life that can make you smile or feel good when you're having a bad day just by being in the same room as you, and he's definitely one of those people."

The Ferraro Family Chair in the Arts was endowed by Jack M. Ferraro H '63 and members of the Ferraro family to honor distinguished achievement in teaching fine arts, performing arts, and arts in association with technology. This Chair is awarded for a four-year term and Greg Cice is the second teacher to be honored.

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