When Susan Clark had her students draw sea creatures, she realized that not all of her elementary school students had ever laid eyes on an actual crab before - so she brought the ocean to them.
Clark lugged a pot of the steamed crustaceans to her classroom, and encouraged the children to go nuts with mallets on a newspaper-covered tabletop.
Clark worked as Wake County art supervisor and an elementary art teacher for more than 35 years. She died last month at the age of 74 after a short battle with lung cancer.
Professionally, Clark was known for her creative approaches to teaching and a love of cultural and historic studies, said Bonnie Torgerson, a longtime colleague of Clark's, but more important, a friend.
Her art classes often tied in with what her students were learning in other classrooms.
For a number of years starting in the late 1970s, Clark, along with Torgerson, pioneered the curriculum at Poe Montessori Magnet School, winning recognition from the National Council for the Social Studies for their 1982 Global Project.
Prior to working at Poe, she was asked to help design the Lynn Road Elementary School art room as it was being built, where she made sure the tables and sinks were built at the children's level.
"If it worked for the kids, that was what we did," said Torgerson, pointing out that the classroom is still considered a model for new art rooms today. "She was very creative and she saw everything so differently."
And before the Wake County and City of Raleigh school districts merged in 1976, she spent a number of years as Wake County art supervisor.
Life on her walls
But her heart was always in the classroom - so much so that she made teaching the priority above her own, personal work, according to her daughter, Christina Baldowski of Wake Forest.
Some of Clark's own artwork adorns the walls of her North Raleigh home, such as her lighthouse series made from cut paper. But most of what hangs are pieces she'd collected over decades of world travel.
"Her life is on her walls," said her younger daughter, Betsy Castle of Jacksonville. There is little space left, bathrooms included. Even the light switches depict art - as seen with one particularly cheeky cover depicting Michelangelo's David.
Traveling adventures
Clark did some traveling as a young girl growing up in Pittsburgh, but the real adventures began when her daughters were about 6 and 11 years old, Castle recalled. Clark divorced in 1965, moving from Indiana to Raleigh as a single mother - but that did not keep her from seeing the world.
"She said, 'You girls want to go to Switzerland for Christmas?'" Castle said. They stayed in a small, cheap hotel a good mile from the train, and everyone had to be quite bundled up.
"It was a fairyland," Castle said. "That was the beginning of our travels as a family."
A later trip included an entire summer spent camping through Scandinavia and into Paris. This was the summer of 1976, Castle said, when she and her sister were 11 and 16.
"A lot of people might not have been real comfortable with that," Castle said.
But her mother was fearless.
Always teaching
Though after raising two children on her own, she was initially reserved about her own daughters going on to have husbands, and children.
But being a grandmother would become one of her great joys in life - and a time to be an art teacher again.
Every time she visited with her two granddaughters in Jacksonville, Castle said, the art supplies were spilled onto the kitchen table as soon as she arrived.
"Every conversation was, 'Tell me about my girls,'" Castle said.
Clark retired from teaching in 1999, but mentored youth members at Our Lady Saviour Lutheran Church, where she was an active member.
Taylor Palmer, 15, was "not even a little bit" interested in art before Clark came into her life at church.
"Now I have four sketchbooks at home filled with pictures that I've drawn," Taylor said.
Clark's online obituary has a number of postings where mothers mention artwork their children did under Clark's tutelage 30 years ago - and how it still hangs from their walls.
"When they walked out of that classroom, everybody had a masterpiece," Torgerson said.
