AHS art teacher finds impressive sketch by rocker
The Daily World - April 15, 1994
By Claude Iosso/Daily World writer
Before Kurt Cobain turned rock on it's head with Nirvana, he wowed his teachers at Aberdeen High School with his artistic talent. This week, his former art instructor Bob Hunter found the one sketch Cobain left behind, an imaginative series portraying sperm evolving into babies. Hunter called the drawing "phenomenal" because of the enterprise and originality involved.
"I find it amazing that someone that age could go and do that," Hunter said. "It was totally different from anything anyone else was doing for that assignment. There's a lot more going on in this person's head."
Although Cobain was a compulsive doodler as a teen-ager, the recent scouring of Aberdeen by television and print reporters from all over the world has turned up none of his other early artwork.
Just a week after he took his own life with a shotgun, the tormented rocker's life is already legendary. It's possible pieces like the high school sketch could become collectors' items. It belongs to Hunter, and it's sentimental value is immense.
Right now, it's monetary value still is negligible, according to Lauren Bresnan, a clerk at Sotheby's New York Office. "We usually don't have much luck with" memorablilia unrelated to a famous person's career, Bresnan said in a phone interview.
Nonetheless, the sketch is drawing some attention locally, so Hunter has placed it in a bank safe deposit box. The piece, which Cobain drew for an assignment about metamorphosis in 1984, resonates eerily with the art he prepared last year for the cover of Nirvana's hit CD, "In Utero."
Cobain drew the unsigned work when he was a junior. He printed his name on it and the grade Hunter gave him, an A+, is on the back. Cobain gave Hunter the sketch to use as an example for future classes. The teacher said he often uses his students' best work in that way.
Over the past 10 years, Cobain's untitled piece has been lost a couple of times in the high school's art storage rooms, Hunter said. After it was missing for about six years, it turned up when Hunter was moving art from one room to another about three years ago. This time around, the sketch resurfaced under a stack of old projects on a high shelf in the kiln room storage.
Cobain dropped out of AHS, but Hunter said he was "right up there with the best of" the students he has taught in his 15 year career. Hunter, a friendly and encouraging instructor, was one of young Kurt's favorite teachers. The teacher was invited to a private memorial service for Cobain last Sunday in Seattle.
Hunter said he believes if Cobain hadn't persued his "grunge rock" music career, he would have been a successful artist. But he would have needed the self-discipline to get formal training, Hunter said. Cobain often rushed through his assignments so he could persue his own projects, the teacher recalled. Some would say that it was Cobain's willfulness that allowed him to bring alternative rock too new heights and then into the mainstream.
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* Special thanx to Stephanie Fischer for the scans
and Hilary Richrod for the articles