In his studio tucked behind a Highway 51 shopping center in Ridgeland, artist Mark Millet has a painting hanging. Made up of mostly reds and white space, it’s of a motorcycle rider hunched over the handle bars, barreling forward at full speed. It hangs in a shop among a bunch of bikes that belong to him and his buddies — along with old cars and guitars. Each accompanied by the smell of grease and paint and gasoline.
The biker in his painting moves fast, but maintains control, similar to the way the artist spends his days.
“I never run out of things to do. I always have something exciting going on,” Millet said with a smile. “I never have a dull day.”
But Millet’s life was not always this way. He was already an accomplished artist before he began teaching in the early-2000s. He said teaching has added an accelerant to his life, enhancing his social skills he had feared had atrophied from his solitary work at the easel.
“I got a lot of painting done in the ’90s, but I slowly figured out I did not know how to talk to people,” Millet said, half with a laugh and half with life-or-death gravitas. “I was like a big kid and I needed to expose myself to more things to gain awareness and continue to grow.”
Millet said he slowly got his groove back as he started teaching classes, first at University Christian School in Flowood where his sons attended, which slowly expanded to two classes a week at his Ridgeland studio.
“I have just been stacking up skills since I started talking to people again,” Millet said.
He elaborated, avoiding the "they have just as much to teach me” cliche, giving real-life examples and applications.
“People want to learn and I have the experience to teach them. But I find the more I interact with them they have their skill sets and interests that you can learn a lot from,” Millet said. “For instance, I have one student that does 5Ks and that got me out running again. Now if you keep doing that from person to person there is no telling what you could learn.”
Millet now teaches at Canton Academy, where he was recruited by the promise of a large teaching space made up of several abandoned classrooms and the creative freedom in his curriculum.
He starts his students off with the foundational building blocks of color and shape.
“Color is something that most people understand but they don’t know they understand. I tell them that they got dressed this morning because they know what looks good. You know this shirt with these pants and the separation of a belt. It starts there,” Millet said. “And every painting you have ever seen starts a s a collection of shapes. If you can think of it that way and break it down you can paint whatever you want.”
Before his students realize it, they are studying the eccentricities of pop art, learning about Greek architecture, or hiking through the woods to sketch an old house. Millet says he is constantly “stacking up ideas” and mixing mediums to engage every students creativity.
“For instance if there is some art class fad we might try it. But then we always take it a step forward and think about how we can paint something interesting over it or incorporate it into another work,” Millet said.
Millet has started an arts and music night where the students at Canton Academy show off their work and try to sell some of their better pieces. Kids interested in music can form a band to perform for the evening. Millet got the idea from his days at UCS, though he has enjoyed the differences of the Canton community.
“At UCS, we all knew each other and vacationed with each other because our kids went to school together. And we are all still very close friends. But in Canton, you have kids whose families have been in the area for three generations or more,” Millet said. “It’s a rare thing to get to be a part of something like that and be accepted into a group like that.”
Millet said the students at Canton Academy have introduced him to music outside of his classic rock and roll roots. They’ve also made him proficient in many functions of his smart phone, including a video editing app.
He said it took him three times sitting down with a student before he understood it. He now releases a minimum of three, minute-long videos a day from his classroom and other projects.
“You just can’t learn something like that when you aren’t exposed to all walks of life,” he said.
Millet's schedule is kinetic and always moving. He spends his with mornings at Canton Academy and afternoons and evenings at his studio teaching painting classes and creating his own works. He does carve out time to rest every day around lunch at his home in the country. He uses painting as an important illustration for segmenting ones life and is perhaps a window into not only his teaching style but his art as well.
“People ask me what medium I like between watercolors, acrylics and oils and I say ‘well I like all three so I can like all three,’” Millet says. “That change keeps you from getting bored and cultivates passion.”
It would seem that apart from his lunches he rarely takes time to rest.
Saturdays consists of meetings at his studio with some metro area bikers for doughnuts, coffee, conversation and planning the next ride.
During the summers and times off from school, he works on the numerous projects he concocted while busy with school. He says he looks forward to the upcoming spring break and summer.
Co-opting and harnessing another cliche for his own use, he said, “I just have so many ideas stacked up, I doubt I can get to them all. But I am fortunate enough to where I have gotten to a point in life where I can appreciate the journey.”
