By GARLAND KENNEDY
Sentinel Staff Writer
Busy at work cutting colored paper and decorating with markers, second-grade students at Keet Gooshi Heen Elementary were learning the basic principles of Tlingit formline art, crafting images of animals under the instruction of local artist Mary Goddard.
On Wednesday, the students were finishing their formline animals, which ranged from a smiling red panda and an owl to an alien and a wolf.
Goddard hopes students finish her two-week introductory class with an understanding of formline principles.
“What we’re trying to do is lay a foundation… Formline artwork is such a complex art form,” she said after students filed out of the classroom. “I’m not going to be able to teach all of what formline entails in one class or at a second-grade level, but what they are able to grasp is those shapes and the understanding of the shapes.”
She was glad for the opportunity to teach young Sitkans the basics of the art form.
“Being able to have the kids at this young age learn some of these foundational elements of formline art is something I think I would have loved to have learned and understood at this age.”
Goddard is Tlingit, Eagle from the Brown Bear house, and her artwork ranges from pieces of personal jewelry to larger copper work such as the inlay on a bench near the Alaska Raptor Center.
She’s been a professional artist for years.
“I grew up in a family of artists, and although my mom didn’t do formline art, she is a basket weaver… We learned a lot of the basics like tracing and cutting and how to put things together and a lot of that problem solving that art helps you do,” she said.
She is spending two weeks this spring working with Keet Gooshi Heen students as part of the state’s Artists in Schools program, supported by the Alaska State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rasmuson Foundation.
While there are many aspects to formline artwork, Goddard has summarized the style into its four basic shapes for her students.
“Initially when we talked about this class, I was trying to figure out what would be appropriate for a second-grade level… My hope for the takeaway would be that the kids would be able to identify the shapes that make up formline art, which are the ovoids, the U-shapes, the S-shapes, the trigons.”
Using those four forms, students assembled a menagerie of paper animals, their second project of the class. In their first formline artwork, the second graders used scratch boards to etch small pieces of jewelry. She calls her class “formline-a-palooza.”
Her son, Ryker, is a second grader in her art class, “which makes this extra special.”
The way Goddard is teaching Keet kids, she said, is different from how she learned the style from another local Tlingit artist: Dave Galanin.
“It was really different from the way I grew up learning formline. We were exposed to the designs, but a lot of it was not explained to me,” she recalled. “It wasn’t until my adult years when I worked with Dave Galanin, as my mentor, that I began to really understand those shapes and know a name for them and be able to identify them in practice.”
Not every aspect of her formline instruction is strictly tradition, she noted. The young students have a wide latitude in terms of color and overall design.
“We talked about traditional formline versus what we’re doing, which is a little more contemporary,” Goddard said. “We didn’t focus on traditional colors, not out of disrespect, but just with the kids’ creativity... The main objective is the shapes, understanding the shapes, identifying them, and hopefully being able to draw them or at least trace them.”
More information on Goddard’s work is published on her website, https://www.alaskamary.com/.
One of Goddard’s enthusiastic pupils is Winnie Turner, 8. She adores red pandas.
“I love their big fluffy tail! Formline art is Tlingit art and you have to have it in the design if you want it to be Tlingit art,” Winnie said as she put the finishing touches on her formline red panda. “And I love red pandas very much. I started loving them after watching the movie ‘Turning Red.’”
She used ovoids to form the red panda’s body, head and legs, with S-shapes representing the stripes.
“I’m probably going to draw the outside of their big fluffy tail, because these are just stripes up their tail. And I’m going to add little line marks on their beautiful paws,” she said.
A few feet away, Nia Backus, also 8, was hard at work on a formline wolf.
“I am doing a wolf because a wolf is my favorite animal,” she said. Nia wore a custom wolf-themed shirt, a gift from her grandmother, to class on Wednesday.
She especially likes wolves’ teeth and their hunting prowess. She was glad for the chance to practice her artistic abilities.
“I’m enjoying that we get all this time to work on art. I like to do art,” Nia said.
Haven Balovich, 8, chose a different four-legged critter for her project: a meerkat situated in a desert environment. Like Nia, she has a particular, film-related affinity for the animal.
“They’re cute. And I have a dog named Timon. And, you know, in ‘The Lion King,’ there’s a meerkat named Timon,” she said.
Though her students have worked with formline art for only two weeks, Goddard hopes they will have future exposure to the millenia-old art style.
“My hope would be, should they take another class in third grade, fourth grade, or fifth grade that they add on,” she said. “So they understand their shapes? Now, maybe their next project is going to understand the rules of how to put it together.”
