A drawing's first obligation is to be a drawing.

The only real question in philosophy is "what is a question?"

VM would take roll at the end of class to see who stayed.

VM had a sign on his door that says, "the Buddha lives within."

Hiram Williams the artist came to lecture at USM; he said the whole trip was worth it just to meet VM. He met VM and talked with him for many hours. "He really came for a visit!"

Definition of a designer is a problem solver.

"VM looked at things in a different, clearer way." Jim Meade

Dean Luce: Vernon Merrifield is good for the elite, but he is no good for the average student.
But the same day Luce said that to Jim Meade, Vernon was teaching at ll pm  and trying to keep from failing a big, slow-witted athlete student, who was clearly not one of the elite.

Sometimes Vernon would pass a poor student, because the student knew his limitations.

One student said "Vernon Merrifield changed my life, not so much about art, but about life." The student [Jeff] went on to build trailers and write plays.

VM's bible: Dynamic Symmetry by Jay Hambidge

Graphic Design student, mid 1980's

There are three things you need before you can draw:
 1. Something to draw with
 2. Something to draw on
 3. A reason to draw

 Those three things were a guessing game that took an entire studio class period to come up with. Student guess things like pencil and paper, but Vernon countered with exceptions, until the class arrived at the first two things. They were stymied about the last though. He kept them guessing and thinking until the end of the class period when he finally said, "A reason to draw."

In a design class where the students were supposed to be working on projects, Vernon asked why one student didn't look busy; he said he was thinking. Vernon said, "No fair thinking."

Module and program; essentials of design. The modulus is the basic unit of a design; the program is the formula that manipulates the module into the design.

On using the Lucygraph, or Lazy Lucy opaque projector tracing machine: Even if you trace, you still have to draw.

We were talking about proportion and the greek saying usually translated 'moderation in all things'; I said it could as easily be translated 'proportion is everything.' VM said, 'Proportion is making the milk come out even with the cake.'

Put some quality into it.

Criticizing an art student drawing outside: she was trying to put those trees on that paper.

You can feel without thinking, but you can't think without feeling.

Every design is about something; about line, or shape or color; what is the dominant element?

He said he used to work at a graphic shop where they 'split hairlines'. 

He said he painted automatic/calligraphic marks into paintings and he had a Japanese friend who would read the marks, who saw Chinese or Japanese characters in the paintings.

He said there could be no PhD in studio art; MFA would have to be a terminal degree because anyone doing work at the PhD level would have no one qualified to evaluate it. It would have to be exploring wholly new ground on the boundaries of art.

When he saw a wall of my portrait drawings using Hambidge geometry as a structure, Vernon said, "The eyes have it." One of the pictures was a llama rather than a person; he said the llama had the most personality. I told Jim Meade about how Vernon had complimented a set of my paintings and drawings one day; Jim did a double take, saying Merrifield hadn't complimented a student's work that much in years. 

When Jerry Walden watched my recursive video art, he said the music doesn't go with the picture; Merrifield said the music was perfect for the picture; he said that tells you something about Jerry Walden.

Vernon was one of the best teachers, one of the best people, I ever knew. He was in the design studio late at night watching students work, helping with their projects, speaking in riddles they could spend the rest of their lives unraveling. 

He always had a gnomic, whimsical twinkle in his eye, almost always smiling slightly. He seemed to see the world from a fresh perspective, certainly a different perspective. His eyes seemed to devour everything in front of them, visually ravenous, piercing. I never saw him angry. He had compassion for his students, treating them as if they were his own children. He gave some places to live in the houses and apartments he and his wife Bonnie owned. He gave them cars. He gave them fatherly advice. 

He was with me the night I talked with Buckminster Fuller backstage after an honors forum lecture. The time had been set aside for tv interviews, but the tv stations had earlier deadlines, so none showed up. Bucky and I talked about geometry and proportion; he got excited telling to look into the numbers, the secret is in the numbers. I said, you mean like the mathematician who said 'all the natural numbers are my personal friends?' Bucky laughed, slowly and knowingly. Vernon chuckled a little. Then others in the room laughed tentatively because they recognized that something clever was going on, but they didn't want anyone to think they didn't get the joke. Bucky put his arm around my shoulders and said he was very happy to meet me; I said it was the best thing to happen to me, so far. Vernon walked with us.

Around that time I was working on recursive structures in video, painting and sculpture. I made plaster molds for vacuum formed plastic shapes that could be glued together in simple or complicated crystal structures. Vernon came with me to the plastics lab at USM where I made the modules; he seemed to like the fact that the pieces fit his module and program design scheme. We made designs by putting found objects into the plastic forming machine; he liked the way the plastic formed clearly in some areas and made transitional areas that tied the figure shapes into the background. The plastic made little crinkles in the corners that were like drawing, or like Hyram Williams' 'processing' a mark into the ground. 

He gave his assignments with precisely defined limits and boundaries. Within those boundaries the students were free to make all the jazz they could imagine, but the tiniest deviation outside the boundaries made the assignment valueless. He knew real world assignments would have these boundaries, and these freedoms. A lot can happen in a 30 second commercial, but a 32 second commercial is worthless. An 8x11 ad in an 8x10 magazine format is worthless. A 3 color design in a 2 color budget is worthless. Student rebelled against the structure; some were frustrated over the Vernonisms, the riddles, the ambiguities. 

Women who were poor designers said he didn't like women. Women who were good designers knew better. One girl student brought academic charges against Vernon after he failed her in his design class. He said she didn't have it; she needed to look for a different career. Some of the art students thought Vernon was being unnecessarily harsh on her. She lost her challenge and the failed grade stood. Eventually she got a job on the  bottom rung of a tv station art department in New Orleans. They had economic woes, so they fired the expensive people and made do with the new girl. She became the head artist in a department of one at a major station in a major market, and her work was terrible. She really should have looked for a different career.

A different girl art student had no alarming talent, but Vernon had no quarrel with her; he knew he wasn't training her to be an artist, but he expected her to be 'a good art consumer' one day. She knew her limitations.

He used to laugh about the students over the years who went to work at the Murray Envelope factory which made stationery for navy ships. They, and I for a while, cut out a photo of a ship, reduced it to line art in a graphic camera, then painted waves to be printed in blue. He joked that the students 'made water.' 

He was amused more than frustrated that the students couldn't understand about keeping the chemistry fresh in the graphic camera developer or the phototypositor. He said they won't dump old chemical out before they put new chemicals in; they thought they could just freshen it up with new chemicals. I told him what an auto mechanic once told me about changing the oil in a car. What do you get if you mix 2 quarts of dirty oil with 3 quarts of new oil? 5 quarts of dirty oil. I think he used that analogy after that to explain why to use fresh chemicals.

He had students fiddle with the corners of their designs before they were reduced on the graphic/stat camera so that the optical aberrations in the camera would pull the corners correctly, and not fill in rounds or round off sharp corners.