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Grace Melvin
Student publications of Vancouver"s art school prospectus compiled by Alexander reveal that Grace Melvin moved to Vancouver to teach crafts in I927, one year after artist teachers J. W. G. (Jock) Macdonald and Fredrick H. Varley, also from Great Britain, joined the staff. Melvin had been an instructor at the Glasgow School of Art, which is where she received her training. Alexander notes Melvin"s pioneering spirit in stating that, when Melvin arrived to teach at the art school, Vancouver was less than fifty years old and had a population of some 125,000. Her brother-in-law, Charles H. Scott, who was married to Melvin"s sister, Jean, had asked her to set up a design department for Vancouver"s new art school of which he was director. The art school had been established just two years earlier. Initially, Melvin took a two-year leave of absence from her teaching position in design and applied arts at the Glasgow School of Art, where she had been on staff for seven years. There she taught pottery, lettering and illumination, as well as embroidery.
Melvin brought with her from Britain the influence of Pre-Raphaelite painters and of the Art Nouveau movement. The most influential person at the Glasgow School of Art, when Melvin was there, was Charles Rennie McIntosh, its architect. During her time as both student and instructor at GSA, she had studied during the summers in London and Paris. This included getting in touch with early manuscripts at the British Museum, where she made copies of these writings. From this experience came her passion for lettering, illuminating, and the book arts, which she passed on to many of her students at Vancouver art school who took crafts from her. The Prospectus reveals that in 1927 her crafts course included pottery and ceramics, embroidery and needlecraft, leatherwork, color-prints, etching, block printing on textiles, commercial art, advertising and commercial layout, lino-cuts, wood-engraving, wood-carving, lettering and illumination, wood decoration, and modeling.
Melvin loved the flora and fauna of B.C. and encouraged her students to look to it for subject matter and training in design. One student admitted that Melvin"s appreciation of B.C. as a newcomer opened their eyes to its beauty. She reported Melvin as having said: "Look around you at the mountains, sea and forest primeval in this gorgeous part of Canada for you will not find color more varied, more subtle or more beautifully displayed than in this part of the world." Melvin also told her students that they will learn more about design by studying nature than by what she could tell them or from what they could read about in any number of books. Melvin also became interested in First Nation"s art and encouraged her students to use such art for inspiration in their own work. With French Canadian anthropologist Marius Barbeau, she co-authored and illustrated a book on First Nation"s legends entitled The Indian Speaks. Students at the art school recognized that Melvin had a close personal relationship with Barbeau, probably the source of her commitment to First Nations imagery in her art and teaching.
Along with her experience in arts and crafts, Melvin transported to Vancouver her knowledge of the art of the broad-edged pen, featuring pen-formed letter shapes. This was an approach to lettering which was new to Canada. To help teach this, she brought with her a trunk full of craft tools and supplies and set up a small supply store in her office, making these supplies available to art school students. She continued to order such supplies directly from Britain during the absence of such materials in Vancouver.
Lettering, illuminating, and heraldry were just a few of the skills that Melvin taught to high school art teachers within the design and applied art courses. Long-time greater Vancouver art teacher Madge Wight, who studied under Melvin at the art school in the mid-1930s, said Melvin had a tremendous impact on calligraphy in Vancouver. One suspects her influence on the art teachers when one considers the subsequent highly accomplished, student-produced lettering that appeared in the high school yearbooks in Vancouver schools. Art teacher Margaret Lewis, who attended the art school as a student during its first five years, wrote an article in the art school"s student publication about Melvin wherein she stressed the lettering Melvin taught her. At that time, lettering was a requirement at the art school for would-be art teacher specialists.
In the early 1940s, Melvin wrote, lettered, and illustrated a teacher manual and a student workbook set entitled
Applied Art
in consultation with Lewis and two other Vancouver educators. Published in 1940 and 1941 by the B.C. Department of Education, the student manual set was to be used in the applied art course available to students majoring in home economics. Besides this manual, Melvin"s main impact on future art teachers in Vancouver seems to have been the concept of looking to one"s own environment for inspiration, the fascination with First Nation"s art, and pen-based lettering, all of which are evident in the art and teaching of her students who subsequently taught art in Vancouver high schools.
Glossary
prospectus:
a detailed document produced by a college, school, or company, which gives details about it