D Nene ee Ae - Pn A OE SOTTO

the part of the Vancouver students until we bring about that happy state
in our own city; for we are the pioneers, and each graduating class is
enforcing our numbers.

Speaking of art students, they are more or less of a kind the world over,
| imagine. Here in the South they are a trifle more sophisticated and
"bohemian." They affect weird clothes, long hair, flowing ties and berets,
or open shirts and "'cords.'' Most of the women students wear trousers
—all kinds—and the sculpture students, of course (a sensible style, too,
for clambering all over ladders and benches to adjust the noses and
hair-lines of their clay models). For casting and working in the stoneyard,
where one is literally buried in dust, a beret, goggles, overalls and a heavy
glove are essentials. Trousers vary from pyjamas of Roman-stripe
materials, or polka dots to blue jeans, sailor pants, golf knickers and khaki
hiking breeks, the latter worn by all fresco students upon their scaffold-
ings. Everyone, without exception, wears the beret tam of every con-
ceivable color.

It's amusing, too, the cliques that form. Students of the same branch all
stick together, with the fresco and sculpture students inclining to
exchange friendly glances and lofty views, and to combine against their
rivals in the fields of "Paints, Pots and Pattern."

Painting students are always tempermental to a degree, are always in a
state of recuperation from the previous evening's studio session, wear
long finger-nails, but withall have a sense of humor. Design and crafts
students rush about with highly colored hands, drying bits of material
in the sunny patio, borrowing books from one another, getting blown up
in the kiln periodically. Nearly all are going to teach—and all expect to
dye! The great fresco artists, mostly male, are very he-mannish in their
breeks, open shirts and leather jackets, as they leap from ladders to scaf-
foldings like veritable Tarzans, and talk in mighty tones of "higher things."
In rumbling tones they insist on the inferiority of women, particularly in art,
and asknowledge no other gods than Diego Rivera, Robinson Jeffers,
and, perhaps, others like Michaelangelo—but grudgingly. Oil paints and
other such "piffle’’ are quite below them—they who paint like the
ancients, directly onto the walls, mixing their own color, plaster and lime
—very mighty fresco students!

The sculptors work feverishly to outdo one another. Russians, Germans,
Japanese mostly, they have hot arguments and a singleness of purpose.

[23]