By Johnnie Most
Contributor

A simple question asked by a high school freshmen of an art teacher in his first year of teaching: "Can you teach me to draw?" Simple answer: " Certainly." From that simple exchange in 1965 has grown the unusual friendship of Willy Heeks and Emile Ferrara. Student and teacher, young artist and only slightly-older mentor, life-long friends.

One successfully traveled the deep art pathways of New York for two decades and returned to his small home state; the other has remained a teacher in Rhode Island and an earnest artist making what he loves and sharing his knowledge with others. As much as their artistic and practical roads diverged, and as much as each changed, the route of their friendship always circled back on itself, for they had not just their experiences with one another in common, but a fundamental belief in art and how you make it.

Heeks, after studying intensively with Ferrara at Bristol High School (now Mount Hope High School), went on to the University of Rhode Island in the turbulent early '70s, but his talent took him to New York City after just two years when he won a Whitney Museum of Art Independent Study fellowship. For two decades later he would remain mostly in New York, refining the conceptual and performance art of his college days into an abstract expressionist form that remains with him to this very day.

Meanwhile, Ferrara continued to make sculpture, to create and to teach generations of Bristol students and eventually students from Warren as well. He filled the lovely garden-yard of his Bristol home with his organic figure sculptures carved from marble, limestone and other rocks, his kinetic, abstract wood sculptures, and his furniture made from unplaned tree branches. He won awards for teaching excellence, including the National Honor Societys Teacher of the year and special recognition for teacher excellence from Tufts University in Boston, Mass.

Early in his career he showed his sculpture in juried exhibitions, winning several awards in the '70s and '80s in Newport, Providence and nearby Massachusetts. Even after retirement from public school teaching, he has continued to work with students, teaching for two years at the Moses Brown School in Providence and currently acting as artist-in-residence there.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that Ferrara has remained the teacher all these years, nor that he and Heeks have maintained a close, very unique friendship. For Ferrara, Heeks was the once in a lifetime student. "Teachers always hope to have a student like Willy; you never expect to find one as early in your career as I did," Ferrara says. "It was a wonderful experience to have a student who wanted to learn everything you knew, who wanted to absorb everything about art that he could."

While Ferarra taught high school, Heeks exhibited in dozens of galleries in New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., San Diego, Texas, and in Europe. He has had his work in group shows in New York City, at the Corcroan Gallery in Washington, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Chicago International Exposition, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Museum of Art at R.I. School of Design. His art is in no less than 31 museum and corporate collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the MFA Boston, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco.

"We took different paths with our art," Ferarra says simply. "Willy pursued one world, and I chose to focus on art education. The great thing about our friendship is that we have learned from one another as the years have gone by, and we continue to learn. For me, that's what life is about."

Heeks would be the first to admit that the learning relationship was not always so equal. "I used art as a refuge when I was a kid," Heeks says, who grew up mostly in foster homes, including one on a farm in Bristol. "When I got to high school I was interested mostly in architectural drawing and auto design," he says. "I had a commercial art orientation, but I knew I didn't know very much. That's why I asked Emile to teach me." "There's no doubt in my mind that meeting Emile was the singular most important event in my life. He turned my head and exposed me to material that became the springboard for my artistic endeavors from that point on."

Ferrara remembers the teen-age Heeks as a conservative, hard working student with obvious artistic talent and a deep desire to learn. They remained strictly student and mentor until Heeks left for college at URI. "After my first year of college, I was living on my own, and during that summer I stayed with Emile and his family frequently, developing a close relationship with them," he recalled. As the years went by while Heeks was in school first in Kingston, then in New York and later working in Philadelphia and Chicago, he and Ferrara corresponded regularly, often exchanging letters that were as much drawings as writings. "I felt I had taught him a lot," says Ferrara, "but my own mentor advised me, the when you leave art school and learn everything over again on your own, then you truly become an artist. I watched what Willy was doing and I wondered, 'When is he going to paint?' He was doing conceptual and performance art, but that was the big movement at the time."

Certainly that was the case in New York in 1974 as Heeks participated in seminars with Brice Marden, Robert Morris, Susan Rothenberg, Dennis Oppenheim and other luminaries at the Whitney program. From 1976-78 he experimented with abstract, minimalist and conceptual concerns in sculpture, painting, photography and even film. He was awarded the first of two NEA grants for his solo performance works, which often used his signature eyeglasses that worked as audio speakers. He substituted the speakers for lenses and would create taped monologues and sounds which would emanate from the glasses in conjunction with his movement in a set.

"Willy was always more honest and open in his art than I," Ferrara said. "I'm more withdrawn. He responded to the things that were happening in the art world at the time: Pop Art and Andy Warhole, minimalism, conceptualism. It was a very intense time."

Ferrara's own growth as an artist happened perhaps only five years removed from Heeks', but it could just as easily have been light years away. After high school in Bristol, Ferrara joined the Army Reserve, and when he finished his active service in the early "60s, he enrolled at UMass, Dartmouth, where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts. "I traveled to Europe, mostly ltaly, after that, and when I returned home, a teaching job appeared out of nowhere," he says. "I stayed 30 years at Bristol High."

In this exhibit at the Bristol Art Museum, which runs through February, aptly titled "Two Artists: Then, Now and In Between," Heeks and Ferrara reveal the journey of their art, and the places it has taken them, and where it has them now. But to understand how their art has traveled so, you must also look at their relationship. Thus, the exhibit includes a section that serves as a time line defined by correspondence and artworks.

"There is a line of inspiration between us to this day inherent in our work and our lives," says Heeks. "It has been a very natural process. Our friendship took off almost immediately. I know a strain in my work comes in part from our relationship." Ferarra explains the strain more specifically by saying: "Nature is the thread in all my work and in Willys. His concept evolves as he works; I do the same thing. The materials dictate the process for me." To illustrate their point, the two laugh together about a pass time that Ferrara learned from his father and handed along to Heek's.

"My family were gatherers and foragers," Ferrara says proudly. "They believed you shouldn't waste any thing. My father and grandfather would hunt and they would go mushroom hunting for cooking. They taught me about it, and I enjoy it to this day. It's a wonderful learning experience. I shared it with Willy, and he took to it right away. Today, he shares things he's learned about mushrooms with me. We've done the same with gardening, and I do it in gathering materials for my art." At this point, Heeks jumps in: "This goes beyond nature to philosophizing. Emile taught me how to learn, and that has driven my art."