THE ART OF LIFE.

Byline: Susan Palmer The Register-Guard

Did the plant make that string?" asks 7-year-old Edwin Farley. He's fingering the tender runner on a grapevine that has curled around the stem, and art teacher Sara Glater confirms that it is indeed a string made by the plant.

Crowding in beside Edwin, 7-year-old Natalie Doe reaches up to a small yellowing leaf with a cupped shape. "It's a bowl leaf," she says.

Glater smiles.

Her youngest students may have no idea what the word "metaphor" means, but they get the concept. That's important for a teacher conveying something beyond technique.

Glater is not your average art instructor. Since moving to Eugene five years ago from Mill Valley, Calif., she has offered private lessons in her home for children and adults. The work she does is as much about waking up imaginations as it is about creating art.

Glater has degrees in printmaking and theater design, and her cast paper art has been shown nationally and locally - most recently she had a piece in the Mayor's Art Show.

But perhaps her profound skill as an artist lies in her reclamation efforts. Her home is filled with art created from odds and ends of everyday life.

A stainless steel box that once held silverware in a restaurant, a cleat from a ship and a small, sculpted elephant all combine to become an attractive planter in her kitchen.

An old ship's porthole frames a textured seascape on the wall in a sunny sitting room. Small box frames transform '30s-era belt buckles into abstract art near her dining table.

"I like to turn old things into something new," she says.

And she brings that sensibility to her classroom, where anything - torn up newspapers, pencil shavings, kitty litter - can be transformed. Glater hasn't bought supplies from an art store in two years.

Instead, she haunts the flea markets, estate sales and second-hand shops for unique things to turn into art. Orders through catalogs such as the whimsical American Science and Surplus supply the rest of her students' needs.

She works with them in a tiny basement room filled with tables made from old, smooth, metal bakery racks. There's just enough space for four students at a time.

On a crisp fall afternoon, the quest is for something green to add to a pulpy grayish soup, part of an art project as tactile as it is visual. Leaves will do the trick, so out the students go to Glater's woodsy backyard, where a grapevine trails across a chain-link fence.

As they pluck leaves from the vine, students get a quick lesson on chlorophyll, then head back inside to add the green to a blender already full of water and newspaper. They strain out the water to reveal a pulpy "mush" - Natalie's technical term for the stuff that will become the texture surrouding a 1-inch tile on a glittery foam core board already decorated with pen and bright copper tape.

The children's imaginations guide them. There's nothing representional about the images, and that's by design. In Glater's classes, art is a way to weave the visible world and the inner psyche into a unique expression. Art for soul's sake.

"Each of us has something to contribute to our culture and to our planet," Glater says, "and we aren't really always aware of what that might be."

Art has a way of bubbling up to the surface, things slumbering just beneath awareness. But that's heavy talk for a process that just feels fun, both for children and adults.

"You can do anything you want. She doesn't put limits on you," says Amos Lachman, an 11-year-old who has taken Glater's classes since he was 7 years old. That actually helps him in other more structured art classes, he says.

"It helps with symmetry. You can recognize patterns," he says.

Sometimes, the work does become representional. Amos is currently creating a papier-mache sculpture of a favorite cat who died recently.

The freedom to explore ideas attracted Barbara Claussenius, a retired therapist who studies with Glater.

"She does give a certain amount of direction," Claussenius says, "but you have the freedom to choose the colors and the design and the way you put it together. And she has a wonderful way of being affirming, no matter what you try to do."

The process doesn't differ much, whether Glater is working with adults or with children.

"I've always believed that children are complete people, not potential beings. I'm meeting them at their level rather than their potential level, and I find them to be equally as interesting if not more than adults," she says.

She finds that adults often bring a bit of art phobia to the classroom.

"Almost everyone who comes seems to have had a traumatic experience in an art setting," she said.

Parents often want children to explain their crayon scribblings. Teachers often want work that "looks like" something else. Kids come away thinking they're not measuring up if their work doesn't match expectations. They end up thinking they can't do art.

Glater isn't trying to create clones of her own work.

"I want them to tell their story in a way that satisfies them," she says.

Glater came to Eugene seeking a slower pace and lower cost of living, and frequents the flea markets and estate sales here just as she did in California.

Tagging along with her is an adventure, says Sarah Meston, a magazine editor who studies with Glater.

"I walk into a place like that and all I see is junk," Meston said. "For her, it's a treasure hunt. She finds all these things, these diamonds in the rough."

Meston doesn't harbor any notion that art will become a vocation for her. Her passion is for writing. But Glater's classes have opened her imagination in other realms.

"I find that when I'm tapping into creativity through writing or artwork or cooking, it makes me happy," she said. "I just try to be more conscious now in making that a part of my life."

CAPTION(S):

An afternoon shadow from a table falls across an old chair that has been given new life with art teacher Sara Glater's personal touch. Kevin Clark / The Register-Guard Above: Natalie Doe reaches for a grape leaf to blend with paper for an art project in Sara Glater's class. Left: Glater draws her artistic inspiration from whatever surrounds her, including the huge leaves of the big leaf maple. "I walk into a place like that and all I see is junk. For her, it's a treasure hunt."- SARAH MESTON, ON GOING TO SECOND-HAND SHOPS WITH SARA GLATER Kevin Clark / The Register-Guard Edwin Farley takes his turn getting a small surprise from Sara Glater at the end of class. "Each of us has something to contribute to our culture and to our planet, and we aren't really always aware of what that might be." SARA GLATER ART TEACHER