Greenbelt Cooperator

The Cooperator found about a dozen persons playing brushes and crayons during a recent visit to the arts and crafts room, (also cloakroom) at the Elementary school. Mrs. Helen Starkweather, who is also art instructor at the Hyattsville High School, encourages class members to use any medium they choose to bring to the sessions, and is equipped to coach and encourage an indefinite variety of art activity.

She has made the Art Room at the Hyattsville high school such an inspiring and interesting place to work that it is mobbed during every free or study period the pupils have to spare.

Mrs. Starkweather invited us to come over sometime to see the student-executed murals which cover the walls of the art room.

Mrs. Starkweather's Greenbelt students so far have been working chiefly on still life groups and life studies.

When the visiting reporter arrived the other night a Hyattsville High School student was acting as a model for the class. Her exotic South Sea face and coloring, oddly at variance with her conventional high school costume of skirt, bright sweater, and moccasins, made her an arresting subject.

The reporter discovered upon inquiry that she was a Filipino.

Mrs. Starkweather gives training in the art of modeling as well as of painting in her high school classes, and this young miss proved herself a star pupil by her poise and absolute immobility.

One oil portrait in the making looked most professional, though the class as a whole had had little or no training.

The rankest amateur is welcome, and Mrs. Starkweather says she still has room for more.

One proof that this art class is no sissy proposition, is that three Greenbelt men have joined up.

Mrs. Starkweather rather headed off any questions about herself, but it was learned that she had studied at the Maryland Institute in Baltimore, the University of Michigan and the Chicago Art Academy.

She enjoys summer courses too, and recently studied at the Corcoran Summer School under Citkowsky and Weis.