Roger Kotoske, 1933–2010

Last week the Denver Post published an obituary for Roger Kotoske, the teacher of the first art class I took in college. I arrived at the University of Denver that fall with an optimisitic and wholly unrealistic notion that I was an artist, based on my limited experiences as a kid who could draw a little better than most of my friends in Waco, Texas, where I had taken a few private art lessons, painted a half dozen mediocre landscapes and still lifes, and mostly spent my time drawing fantastic adventures for a bevy of superheroes I’d invented. Kotoske’s introductory class was a revelation. There were kids in there from big cities who could really, really draw, who (unlike me) understood the exotic lexicon of the art world and who (unlike me) seemingly had no trouble producing competent solutions to the insidious problems in design and composition our teacher kept inflicting on us. Kotoske was a larger-than-life force in the classroom. He was handsome, forceful, inspiring, and terrifying. He would tack the projects we had slaved over for hours (I had, anyway) the night before and rip them apart — literally. When one of us would gasp as he tore our latest magnum opus to pieces, he would turn to his victim and remind the class derisively that what he had just destroyed was homework, not art.

Kotoske never did get my name right. He kept calling me Steve. When I finally had the courage, near the end of the trimester, to remind him that my name was Ed, he said something to the effect that it didn’t really matter, that with my limited talent nobody would ever know my name anyway. To this day I don’t know if he was serious; I strongly suspect that he was. Whatever, that conversation had a bracing effect on me. From that moment on I bore down and tried mightily for the next four years to prove him wrong. I took only that one class from him my freshman year, but he was a teacher one doesn’t forget.

Rest in peace, Mr. Kotoske. And thanks for the lessons.