By Heather Matthews
Staff Writer

Stay-at-home moms, carpenters, teens, public planners, gymnastics instructors and college students are just a few of the students that pass through Megan Bogonovich’s classroom door at the beginning of each semester.

“There’s a real gambit of people,” said Bogonovich, an instructor at the Kimball-Jenkins School of Art.

The students of Kiki Cassista’s “Drawing What You See” class, Alex Bostic (foreground), Megan Hewey, and Lauren Myers, prepare for the school’s Student and Faculty Art Exhibit.

Some have never even thought about art before taking her Learn to See, Learn to Draw class, according to Bogonovich, but by the time they leave, each student has a new appreciation for art.

“People come in claiming they can only draw stick figures,” she said. “They think people are born with these skills, but truth is with tons of practice and a few learned skills, it is accessible to them, too. They also learn it’s hard to make art. After someone’s tried to paint and then goes to see a Rembrant in a museum, they think ‘(Wow) that was hard.’ After one of my pottery classes, they look at coffee cups a different way.”

Established in 1999, the Kimball-Jenkins School of Art started out with just one studio and a handful of classes. Now the School of Art currently serves more than 1,150 students from 62 different communities, including its home of Concord and the surrounding area, from as far away as Plymouth, New London and Nashua.

Open to students of all ages, the school holds classes in the traditional visual arts mediums of photography, ceramics, watercolors, drawing, sculpture and mixed media, while also offering classes in more contemporary mediums as well, including encaustics, stained glass making and cartooning. At the earliest levels of classes, the school’s youngest students – ages 3 to 5 years old – are encouraged to explore all mediums and types of art and embrace their creativity. Classes start to become more focused in specific disciplines at the middle school level.

Art classes are not the only thing Kimball- Jenkins has to offer the community, however, said Darryl Furtkamp, the school’s director of art education.

“We’re even more than just a school,” he said. “We’re a visual art center. There’s a real art climate around this place. Concord and this region really needs this sort of institution. We give students a creative outlet, but also develop an appreciation for the art.”

While Concord does have a small community of commercial galleries within its borders, Kimball- Jenkins, said Bogonovich, offers something more.

“The Anderson-Soule is a nice gallery, but your job there is to buy the art,” said Bogonovich.

“Art is more involving than that. You have to spend time looking at it, thinking about it. If you do that, the Anderson-Soule is a whole new gallery.”

The Kimball-Jenkins Estate has two exhibition galleries on its campus, giving the school’s students and faculty as well as other local artists a place to exhibit their work. The galleries also expose Central New Hampshire to new artists, while offering residents a break from their every day lives.

“People’s routines are so very boring. Art takes you out of the familiar and challenges you to think about things you wouldn’t normally. It’s so intellectual and so stimulating. It’s the same reason that people go to a performance, to stimulate something beyond those survival instincts,” said Furtkamp.

The school and its galleries promote a personal interaction between art and the community, said Furtkamp, allowing people who might not understand art feel comfortable with it and developing an attachment to it.

“You can have a personal interaction with art. You can develop the same attachment to a piece of art as you can to a piece of furniture,”

he said. “A painting, like any other art form, feeds you over time and gives you more to think about. We make art more accessible to people. We want them to understand it and just feel that it’s OK to ask what (the art) means.”

The school’s Fall 2005 Faculty and Student Exhibition will open tonight, Thursday, Dec. 15, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. The Kimball-Jenkins Estate is located at 266 N. Main St. For more information, call 225-3932.

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