Work in progress Mary Elsa Hocker’s life, art is evolving
Published 1:02 am Sunday, September 11, 2011
It could be used as a relish dish, or perhaps just an objet d’art that Mary Elsa Hocker was holding, but it looked a lot like a leaf, a stylized one with a distinctive glaze, maybe — but definitely a leaf, complete with veins and a stem and scalloped edges.
It began as a piece of clay shaped from a real leaf, an elephant ear, and it was formed and glazed and baked in Mary Elsa’s kiln in her Vicksburg studio. To get the right pattern took time, as did finding and mixing the right clay and creating the perfect glaze. All that takes a lot of skill as well as creativity — she makes her glazes of “everything that looks interesting, like a ground-up Coke bottle. You do a lot of experiments before you hit the jackpot, before you finally get to where you want to go.”
It was over three score years ago that she was brought home from the Baptist hospital in Jackson to a garage apartment. Her grandmother wasn’t thrilled about climbing all those steps to see the grandchild, so they bought a duplex where both families lived. Being spoiled wasn’t allowed, Mary Elsa said, but her folks fed her abundant curiosity — which “didn’t require things and money. It only required opportunity.”
When her parents moved to Lucedale, she stayed for a while but went back to Jackson to live with her grandparents because of more opportunities and a better school system, plus “my mother and dad didn’t want me going through life getting beat up on the school bus.”
When Mary Elsa was a child growing up in Jackson, her grandmother frequently took her to the old Carnegie Library where she checked out all the books about an Indian girl who made pottery.
That really sparked her interest and, she said, “We cleaned out Woolworth (a five and dime store) because I wanted modeling clay.”
Her interest in art isn’t restricted to pottery. She has worked with stained glass, sculpting, carving, and she paints in oils and watercolors. Her talent was evident when she was very young — “when I used to draw pictures on the walls.” By the time she was 7 or 8, she was duplicating Kennington ads in the newspaper, and then “I graduated to Christmas cards. My parents never had any trouble with me — I was always drawing.”
It was under the tutelage of Marie Hull, Malcolm Norwood and Mary Katherine Loyocano in the Jackson schools that she got her formal training.
Marie Hull was a neighbor and family friend who gave Mary Elsa her first art lessons, and Miss Hull wouldn’t let her paint in oils “until I was about 15. Finally she said I was ready, and I thought I had died and gone to heaven. She taught me until I graduated from high school.”
Mary Elsa doesn’t paint like Miss Hull, but there are similarities such as the use of many colors and of warm and cool colors together. One of Mary Elsa’s most prized possessions is a painting by the famous artist, one commissioned by her grandfather as a high school graduation gift, a painting that cost $75.
It isn’t just the painting that is special — it’s the provenance behind it. When Miss Hull and Mary Elsa’s grandfather were children, he had a crush on her. He tried to steal a kiss, she slapped him and he fell and broke his arm, “which ended the romance but not the friendship.”
Marie Hull grew up in Summit, virtually a small-town art colony. She studied in Paris and taught by the French method — a lot of students in a big room, “and if you weren’t getting it, they would grab the brush out of your hand and give you a demonstration on how to do it, or would say, ‘This way.’ That’s the approach Marie Hull used.”
When Mary Elsa went to Randolph-Macon College in Virginia she made straight A’s in art, didn’t have to study, so she could go off on weekends, and decided art would be her major.
While at college she met Jim Hocker, a student at the Naval Academy. It was a blind date, and she found the Oklahoman “the most different person I had ever met.” But opposites attract, and her passion for art was matched by his interest in engineering — “all he wanted to be, heart and soul.” Though he became an officer in the armed forces and earned a degree in law, “that wasn’t exciting. He wanted to be out there where they were drilling the wells.”
Their marriage in January 1960 that began a life of opposite interests was interrupted by military service. They had been married less than a year when his orders came to go to Korea, and she wanted to go with him. She couldn’t go as a dependent, so she wrote the top general a letter that must have been very persuasive, for she was given permission to go as a tourist. She’d saved money from working as an interior designer and bought her ticket to Seoul.
They drove from Texas, where Jim was stationed, to California, driving through New Mexico and other places Georgia O’Keefe had painted, and Mary Elsa fell in love with the western scenes. As a swap — Jim had indulged her, she said — she agreed to go to Las Vegas.
“I had been to New York and places like that,” she said, “but I had never been to Las Vegas. Here I was — total innocence — and I thought I was in Sodom and Gomorrah. It was Sin City, and I thought we would be smoked and turned to stone.” It was many, many years before she went back — and then it was on a geological expedition.
In Korea, Mary Elsa got a job teaching English and had time to take art history classes at Seoul National University and did some sculpting and carving. “It was my bag,” she said. Jim was on base, but they spent weekends together.
It came to a sudden end one morning with frantic knocking on her apartment door. The German ambassador, who had become a good friend, sent one of his staff to get her out of the building as students were rioting against the government. She grabbed her purse and nothing else and was soon crammed into a vehicle that had a German soldier on top with a machine gun.
When Mary Elsa saw an American flag it was the 8th Army compound, so she got out, was whisked inside and then asked to be taken to the Officers’ Club. When her presence there was questioned, she stated that she was a tourist, an unauthorized dependent, “which saved my bacon.” She was shown a table where she could collect her thoughts, and that night the officer in charge gave her his room while he stood guard outside the door.
Meanwhile, Mary Elsa’s father had contacted Sen. John C. Stennis about his daughter’s safety. Stennis got in touch with the general, “and my cover was blown.” From that point on, the general’s wife took over and provided her guest house for Mary Elsa, “and here I was living in luxury!”
Situations like this, Mary Elsa said, have convinced her that there are guardian angels, “and I believe it with all my heart.”
In later years, while Jim was getting his master’s degree in science and engineering at the University of Arizona, Mary Elsa, too, would go to graduate school. She had $50 her grandfather had given her for Christmas, just what it cost to enroll. She applied, submitted her transcript, was accepted and thought she’d get a master’s degree in fine arts.
“I had a pretty good idea for my thesis,” she said, but the head of the department “had an idea of what I wouldn’t be doing. “ She knew a lot about Oriental art — but he didn’t.
That’s when her life took a different turn. With children of her own, she became interested in teaching them to read, so she took every class she could on the subject and was offered an assistantship while earning a master’s in education — a degree they had never before granted.
Later, at the University of Virginia where Jim was in law school, she continued her studies while raising a family and earned her doctorate in visual motor perception and became an adjunct professor.
Mary Elsa thought they would eventually live in Jackson, maybe in the Belhaven district, but when her daughter Clara, who lived in Vicksburg and taught at Culkin, fell and was injured, the Hockers moved to Vicksburg and bought a house on Chambers Street.
She was no stranger to Vicksburg. As a child, the family often picnicked in the Vicksburg National Military Park, climbed the winding towers and went down to look at the river. Some Sundays, they came after church to eat at the original Old Southern Tea Room.
She’ll never forget her personal welcome to the River City after she moved here. She was pruning bushes when a car stopped, a lady got out and asked who she was.
It was Mrs. Clyde Everett, “who probably wanted to know who was moving into her turf.” Mrs. Everett commented that they looked thirsty, and Mary Elsa’s answer must have struck the right chord, for soon Mrs. Everett left, then returned with a silver tray, silver julep cups and cloth napkins — “the whole nine yards.”
In all her travels and experiences, Mary Elsa never lost sight of her love of art. She has won numerous awards, some very prestigious, and laughed about the purchase award at Randolph-Macon which was cash, “and it bought a lot of gasoline.”
Her art, she said, “is of the moment, and it is evolving, I keep growing, till I outgrow it, and go into the next phase and the next….” Some have suggested that she develop or adopt a certain style so that people will recognize her work, but her thought is, “Well, you know I don’t really care.” She’s motivated by the creative pool, that “you get a blinding vision and you do it, like St. Paul on the road to Damascus.”
You won’t find abstracts in her portfolio, though she has been urged to do large paintings and abstracts. She decided against it, she said, because though abstracts are easy, “you can run them off like a mill, but people don’t buy those because they don’t remind them of anything.”
She’s not alone in her disdain for abstract art, she said, for French artists have become appalled at the lack of quality in French art, of the philosophy that there is no right or wrong, that if you like it, it’s good.
“They’ve had enough of this,” she said. “They are rebelling.”
There’s a very strong spiritual side to Mary Elsa. She grew up going to church, in an environment of prayer and meditation, “of being able to feel that electricity.” She believes “there’s a very spiritual part of our brain that God has reserved for our circuit board, or whatever you want to call it, for Himself. If you go through life, starting when you’re young, you keep that open, keep it going, never, never, never turn away from it. The more you develop it, the closer you walk with God.”
To her, “art is a gift of the Holy Spirit.” She said, communing with God is something you do all your life, and everything else “is just icing on the cake.”
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Gordon Cotton is an author and historian who lives in Vicksburg.