AN ARTSY ESCAPE
Caryn McArthy and Barbara Innes
According to FAIRLADY’s Creative Director, Caryn McArthy, her high school art teacher was the sole reason she made it through what would otherwise have been a horrible high school experience. ‘She was the only teacher who didn’t say I was going to land up selling toothpaste at a supermarket,’ she says.
‘We immigrated to Cape Town from Zimbabwe when I was 15,’ Caryn explains. When she started at Sans Souci Girls’ High School, she struggled to adjust.‘That’s an awkward age to make such a big adjustment. As with emigration anywhere,
everything feels foreign and peculiar. I think I literally wept every day for three months.’
‘I’ve never been a massively academic person and I think a big problem was that the teachers focused too much on academia and not enough on arts, culture, and music. They weren’t very forward-thinking.’
‘I was never lifted up or made to feel good about myself,’ says Caryn. ‘The only place I ever felt fantastic was in the art department and with my art teacher, Ms Innes, who was about two bricks and a tickey high, but was a force to be reckoned with.’ For Caryn, the art class felt like an escape; it was in a beautiful room
‘When I visited Musée d’Orsay in Paris, I stood in front of the Renoir paintings and just wept.’
with high ceilings and tall, wooden windows that let in the beauty of the forest and the mountains that tower over Newlands.
‘Ms Innes was firm and lovely, and quite nutty,’ says Caryn. ‘She opened doors for me; she opened up my brain. I’ve always been artistic, but from a History of Art point of view her classes were magnificent. She literally took us around the world through art.’
When Caryn finally got her real escape after finishing high school and starting to travel the world, she ended up in the various places Ms Innes had taught her about from those dusty art history books.
‘When I went to Athens,
I told my daughter, “We’re getting up at six o’clock in the morning and I’m hauling you up that mountain so we can look at the Parthenon for Ms Innes!”’ Caryn laughs. ‘When I visited the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, I stood in front of the Renoir paintings and just wept. I couldn’t control my tears; they just poured down my face. So much so that the other tourists were taking photos of me, and not the Renoirs.’
When Caryn met with
Ms Innes (who she now calls ‘Barbara’) 35 years later and told her the stories of her travels, Barbara was thrilled.
‘If you do something for a living where you try and impart wisdom to young people and you get this kind of feedback all these years later, it all makes sense because you made a difference in someone’s life – and she certainly made a difference in mine,’ Caryn says.