15 BYTES May 2004 page 3, Dave Chaplin, David Chaplin's Opus, Layne Meacham, Darryl Erdmann

Chaplin's Opus . . . continued from page 1

Erdmann remembers seeing Chaplin for the first time on the Weber State University campus : "When I first saw David Chaplin I had signed up for a design class with him. I didn’t know anything about him and when I saw him the first thought I had was ‘He’s not from around here. He’s from back east.' He was all dressed in corduroy. He had a corduroy jacket with the patches on the sleeves. His coat couldn’t cover his long arms. He had a beta hair cut and these great big sixties glasses on. I thought to myself, He’s gotta be from Boston.”

But Chaplin was a local boy. A Westerner, at least. A native of Wyoming, he had studied at the University of Utah and began teaching art in Salt Lake City in his twenties.

What Chaplin had was dash. He had the look of an artist. An eccentric. A personality. But for as much dash as his personal and artistic style might intrigue his students, Chaplin was a mild-mannered individual, often difficult to read. A man of few words, he would often look over a students work, pipe in hand and utter a few words of encouragement or the ever enigmatic, “That’s interesting.”

But Chaplin’s words could mean a great deal to his students.

Salt Lake City artist Layne Meacham was in the seventh grade when he met Chaplin as his art instructor at Hillside Junior High in the early sixties. By his own account, Meacham was a zitty-faced fourteen year old troublemaker. Chaplin allowed him to take three art classes just to keep him in school. One day, while Chaplin was walking around the classroom, looking at the art, he stopped at Meacham and held up his piece to the class. It was an abstract mass of paint, a south pole to the realistic renderings the other students were trying. Chaplin said, “Now this is art! I wish I could paint this way.”

“You can imagine what that did for me,” Meacham says. “What he was saying was ‘Here’s the f***- up, but here’s what he can do.’ Needless to say that’s why I’m doing art forty years later.”

“The great thing about Chaplin,” Meacham continues, “is that he was real with me. He had groupies that would follow him around, but he would just talk to me one on one. I remember one day he had me come into his office. He lit up his pipe and said to me ‘So, what do you want to do?’ ‘Go to Europe,’ I said. ‘Well, that’s a good idea. Make sure you do it on your own.’"

Meacham pauses for a moment in relating the incident. "You know, to this day I’m not sure why he said that."

Trent Alvey, another Salt Lake City artist, was also a student at Hillside. She was thirteen, had recently moved to Salt Lake from rural Utah and had a troubled family life. “Learning art from Mr. Chaplin led me to the slow discovery that I had an outlet for my feelings. By learning to make art, I had a powerful tool, a process for channeling emotions, a method for sorting out a very confusing life. Just by doing art, I could feel better. More free. Less burdened. Almost carefree. From those years of Mr. Chaplin’s art instruction, I had a survival kit for the rest of my life, even though I may not have realized it at the time.”

Chaplin seems to have had a unique talent for inspiring his students and then getting out of their way. “Mr. Chaplin gave me freedom when other teachers gave me popsicle sticks and white glue,” says Sri Whipple, one of Chaplin’s more recent students in Park City.

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But even Chaplin, at least in his early days, was not immune to handing out popsicle sticks, as Alvey relates. “I recall one art project specifically. We were instructed by Mr. Chaplin to build anything we wanted with toothpicks and glue. Some people were working on challenging architectural structures, others on extensive barnyard scenes, as I recall. I had learned to take his words literally, if he said, “anything” he must have meant it. I proceeded to take all of my toothpicks and pile them up randomly with one hand, glue in the other, mixing enough of one to secure the other, thereby building up a beautiful and unpredictable sculpture . . . I was praised heavily by Mr. Chaplin. The courage that I gained from that experience was invaluable. He had a way of evening the playing field for the kids, like myself, who were either misfits or a bit too particular for the mainstream, giving us permission to continue in our own way.”

As for his teaching philosophy, Chaplin says “I was not interested in making little artists. I was interested in making people who could be literate as far as the visual world was concerned . . . I was looking for ways to let kids know that art is a real thing. That it’s not just something you do for your mom and she hangs it on the refrigerator for two weeks. But that it really exists in our society, and there’s a reason for the way it looks.”