Artist, Lover, Forger, Thief with Author Sheila Sharpe (Ep. 463)

Welcome to Art Ed Radio, the podcast for art teachers. This show is produced by The Art of Education, and I’m your host, Tim Bogatz.

I just finished a great book. It was called Artist, Lover, Forger, Thief by Sheila Sharpe. Let me tell you, it was riveting. Finished it in a day and a half. Everyone in the art world, and honestly, most of our students are always interested in art crime and art forgery, so when I first got my hands on this book, my original thought was, “Oh, could this book be good for the classroom? Could this be an interesting way to hook kids or find something engaging for them?” Let’s just say that’s not the case. All right?

Within the first chapter, you realize this book is not going to be classroom friendly, but the book is great, and if you have an interest in art, I would recommend it. It’s entertaining, it’s complex, it’s fast-paced, and there’s so many nods to famous painters and famous paintings as we dive deep into art history. If you like thrillers or you like crime novels, I will definitely recommend it. It is a compelling read.

I’m lucky enough to have the author, Sheila Sharpe on the podcast today. She’s coming on as an author, but also as a former art teacher and a psychologist, so we’ll have a lot to talk about. Not only the book, but maybe some teaching stories, some art history, some conversations about art crime and forgery. A lot to get through, so let me bring her on now.

Okay. Sheila Sharpe is joining me on the show now. Sheila, how are you?

Well, somewhat mixed. Really happy to be here because it took quite a job to get here.

I was going to say, we had some technical difficulties getting this all put together, but you are here now. We have a lot of exciting stuff to talk about, so thank you for coming on. Thank you for joining me. I would love to, if we can, just begin with an introduction. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and a little bit about your work?

Most currently, I just launched my first novel on Sunday, and that’s been occupying a huge amount of time. I mean, it’s extremely exciting, but it was very stressful.

Yes, I’m sure.

If I’m not launching my first novel, which is by the way, a long process, I mean-

I’m sure. I’m sure.

… the publication part and so on, but otherwise, I practice as a psychologist part-time. Anytime I can, I write. I was working on being less of a workaholic, but it hasn’t taken yet.

Not yet. Not yet though. Okay. I wanted to ask you, we have an audience of art teachers here, and I know you have worked as an art teacher in the past. I know people would love to hear about that, so can you just tell us, I guess, about your art career, about how you got into art teaching, and if you have any, I guess, good stories to share from your time in the classroom?

Yes, I know that question really brought up memories, I have to say. Well, of course, my interest in art goes back to pretty much early childhood when I just fell in love with making art as a little kid. Along with that, as I grew a little older, I mixed that with writing. I illustrated my own books after I got able to do that.

I love it.

I wrote my first novella at age 11, which was not focused on art, but the top, I think at that point early in my life was to be an artist, secondarily a writer. I was an undergraduate art major, and after I graduated, I didn’t get into the Yale graduate that had all these famous people teaching. So I plots myself in New Haven and took an art teaching job at Sleeping Giant Junior High. Now, granted, and this is where I have so much respect for teachers, I had no training in education. I just had training in how to do painting, sculpture, et cetera. It turns out you really need training in education, especially seventh and eighth grade.

Oh my goodness. Yes, yes.

It’s not very easy, this group, to break in. I like kids and I thought this might work out okay, even though I didn’t know how to run a classroom, but it was really tough. I think the problem was not so much I could think of things the teach. They had a rather stringent curriculum in this place. I mean, you teach perspective, color theory. I mean, it was really quite elaborate, but the thing was you had to be able to keep order in the classroom in order to teach it. I just didn’t know jack about that. I tried to be nice and that wasn’t working at all.

Now, the thing was I had different groups, and I think I must’ve had one class full of all the difficult students in the school that no teacher wanted to be dealing with, and they were all in my art class, so that was a hellish interlude. Then I had people at the top, kids that were at the top of the heap in terms of testing and intellect and all that, and they were a joy because they cared about learning something and then they could listen to me at least for a little bit, and so I did enjoy that class.

But I was up most nights planning how to teach something because I didn’t know some of the techniques of this age group, what I was learning like potato printing. I would be up in the night teaching myself these things. Of course, with the potato printing class, that didn’t go terribly well with the group that loved to torture me. But they started rolling these things down the hallway. Meanwhile, in the classroom above me, there was a philosophy graduate student from Yale who desperately needed a job, and so he had no training in how to teach anyone either. Upstairs above me, all the students were drumming their feet on the ceilings of my room. The students in my room, two of them snuck out, were rolling, rolling potatoes down the hall. Okay, that is a memory that ought to inspire all of you.

I have to say though, just based on this experience, I have the greatest admiration. The woman across the hall from me, well, she had been trained and she said it was no picnic even being trained. She would give me advice that I can’t really do this nicey-nice thing. That was ridiculous, and I couldn’t be a severe boss type person because then they just resented you and did passive-aggressive stuff, if not aggressive, aggressive. I had support from the other teachers and they sympathized because they’d been through it even though they had training. That was that, and I thought, “Gee, I can’t do this job. I’m not suited. I’m just not.” I liked the kids, but I really liked working with them one on one. The group was more difficult.

But then when I ultimately did get into art graduate school at UCSD, I taught the undergraduates. Even though I was just a TA, they basically gave me the course and I could do that. That was a totally different thing. I mean, the students cared, and they listened to what you said, and it was fun watching their work improve. Now, I can’t bring back a standout experience other than I just thought, “This is so great.” I thought I wouldn’t want to ever teach again, but I like [inaudible 00:09:56]-

I mean, I feel like rolling potatoes down the hallway would qualify as a standout experience. That is something memorable. Well, and that’s something everyone who’s taught middle school is shaking their head yes, right now going, “Yeah, I can see where that would happen. I understand that.”

Oh, I think to put it all together is just incredible.

Let’s talk about the book though, because I think we’re all fascinated by art forgers, people who are forging paintings, and so I guess a two part question. First of all, what piqued your interest with the idea of forgery, and then what made you think that art forgery should play a role in your novel?

Okay, sure. I think it was the coming together, first of all, of many things that I had been a lifelong mystery thriller fan. I had been a lifelong art person. I was naturally drawn to art, and so I certainly read on the subject, and I certainly started to read, being in psychology, many of the biographies and memoirs of the very famous art forgers. I tell you they’re the most fascinating stories. I just got totally hooked and I thought, “God, I want to write about one of these guys.”

Now, meanwhile, in my practice, I had a couple of shady art collectors, and I saw a couple of dubious dealers, art dealers we might call them. Then really stunning was this couple that were con artists, and you can imagine what their problems were about. But anyway, these types of folks don’t usually come to therapy, but I got lucky somehow. But they really opened the door to the art underworld, and in a direct way, so I wasn’t just reading about it, I was hearing about it.

It’s very interesting for me to hear how that came to life because I literally just finished the book last night before we were doing this interview, and so it’s very fun for me to hear about your own experiences with shady art dealers and with criminals and with con artists and with art forgers because all of that shows up in the book, and so just drawing the line from one to the next I think is super interesting. That’s fun for me to hear about all of that, and how your real life experiences inspire this fantastic story.

As far as the fiction in this category goes, it’s a small subcategory of art crime to focus on forgery, but actually the interest in it is growing. There’s so many art crimes now that get advertised that… Well, I don’t know. You have to be alert to it, maybe to notice. Art crime is something that people don’t realize is enormous. Six to eight crooked billion a year is coming from art crime.

Yeah, it’s huge.

It supports terrorism, it supports gun running, it supports drug trafficking, money laundering, tax evasion. I mean, you name it. It’s the favorite of wealthy people to… Anyway, so I do try to educate, here comes my teaching part, educate the public to what the art world, underworld, where they blend together is all about, and how dangerous it is, and how much it runs things behind most of our backs, unless we’re wealthy people that collect.

I was trying to have several layers to the story. Have it be entertaining, exciting, a good love story, a complex love story, and educate, to some extent, and have a psychological depth to the characters and the meaning of art forgery and art crime to many, many people. I was trying to do a lot of different things. I don’t know how you feel I succeeded.

No, I was just going to say, I feel like you checked all of those boxes, to be honest, because I think… I don’t know, just in my opinion, it worked really well as, like you said, a very fast-paced psychological thriller type story. Being an art teacher, I loved the very specific references to actual paintings, and so I think there’s that depth there for those of us that are art fans, but yet at the same time, if you don’t know anything about art, I think it’s still accessible to people.

I think it’s written in a way where those ideas are accessible and it’s a good introduction to all of those things where maybe there’s enough, your interest is peaked because there are some things about art forgery that fascinate all of us. But then when you really dive in, you get invested in that world as you’re reading the book, for lack of a better term. It really feels like the depth is there and it tells a good story of everything that’s going on when you have those shady art dealers, when you have the villains of the story, and it does a very good job of talking about all of the unsavory things that are going on with that as well.

I think I was trying to… I thank you for that. That was really nice to hear. Thank you. We want to please the readers, so I’m glad one is.

No, job well done, I will say. I really loved it.

I mean, any book is very hard to write. It’s a lot of effort and blood, sweat and tears, you know the thing. But there is a lot of fun in this kind of thing. The learning, the research, and the creation of these situations. Forgery stories have this kind of fascinating quality typically. I mean, even the ones you see in the newspaper or in the art magazines, so I don’t think it would be hard to get anybody interested.

No, no, I think you’re right. Okay. I have two questions for you to wrap things up. First one is just for me personally. As soon as I put the book down, I was like, “I’m ready to read more about Kate O’Dade. Do you have more plans for her? Are there future books coming, or are you working on anything else with her as a character?

Oh, yeah. This is that story, and I have difficulty being brief. I do apologize. Anyway, I want to get the whole story out, you see. There is a prequel, and that’s the first novel I wrote, which is about her. It’s about her. Nick, forger guy isn’t in that story, but several of the other characters are in the one you read. I think the publisher, given this does decently, wants to publish that one next in, actually, the end of the year, possibly. I mean, who knows. But then I have one planned for the sequel to this one, which would involve Nick, Kate and Cromwell, the art investigator. I thought it might circle around that lost Vermeer, The Concert that was stolen in the Gardner heist.

Yes.

That’d be worth, if found-

Oh, goodness. Who knows?

… more than, they say, than was paid for the Leonardo, Head of Christ that sold for 450 million.

I was going to say it was like, 400 and some million dollars.

It would be more than that, The Concert.

Last thing, to wrap things up. If people are interested in finding this book, where can they find it?

Well, it’s on Amazon now.

Easy enough.

I think it might be in all its forms now. It’s certainly there as an eBook, but I think it’s a paperback and hardback as well.

We’ll make sure we give a link to everybody so they can find it. All right, well, Sheila, thank you so much. It’s been great talking to you. I appreciate your time, love the book, and really enjoyed talking to you today.

Well, thanks so much for putting up with all of this, and I enjoyed talking with you.

Thank you so much to Sheila for that conversation. Again, if you’re interested in the book, it’s called Artist, Lover, Forger, Thief, and we’ll link to the book in the show notes if you’re interested in picking up a copy, and if you end up reading it, I would love to hear your thoughts, so shoot me an email, tell me what you think, timothybogatz@theartofeducation.edu. I’m also going to link back to some older podcast episodes that we’ve done about art crimes or forgeries or other stories from the art world that may be of interest, like stories that might help you engage your students and get them interested in a little bit more about the world of art. Hopefully you can find something in all of those resources that can give you some good stories to take back to your classroom.

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