By Victor Greto
For Teresa Haman, the dirt road in front of her family’s Ellendale mobile home was her link to the world.
The dusty road, just south of Milford, was how her mom got to the poultry factory job, and her dad’s first mile as a long-haul trucker.
During the early 1960s, it took her on what’s become a life-time journey of African-Americans, starting with her role as one of the first to integrate Ellendale Elementary School.
“I could have taken the road either to the poultry factory or to college,” says Haman, 54, an artist and educator.
The latest part of her trek is to research and paint 30 landscapes about Delaware sites of the Underground Railroad, a secret network of roads and safe houses used by escaping slaves.
It combines her passions for history and art, and builds on her own heritage.
“Some of my ancestors were slaves, others were Quakers who helped slaves escape,” she says. “It really helped put things in perspective for me.”
It’s her second series of landscapes she’s painted for her “Delaware’s Hidden Treasures.”
The projected 30 paintings, 10 of which Haman has completed, are set to be exhibited by 2010.
Her first Underground Railroad painting was completed in Cambridge, Md., near the Delaware border at the Choptank River, where runaway slaves, including Harriet Tubman, first set their sights on the first state.
“I want to capture the spots, and when I finish, you’ll feel what it was like,” she says.
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“The most exciting thing to do in Ellendale was to stand on the corner and count the license plates,” Haman says of her youth.
She attended an all-black, two-room schoolhouse until the third grade when she was assigned to help integrate Ellendale Elementary.
“I knew I wanted to be successful,” she says. “If I didn’t, the rest couldn’t come.”
Haman began drawing very young, then painting the sets for school plays. What kept her engaged was “Upward Bound,” a 1960s government program that encouraged poor children to pursue college.
It changed her life, taking her to Broadway shows and summer physics classes. The experience also introduced her to the University of Delaware during one six-week summer program. After graduating from high school in 1971, she decided to attend UD and major in psychology.
This idea was influenced by the fevered racial politics of the time. “I wanted to know why whites didn’t like blacks, and vice-versa,” she says.
Invigorated, she sought a career in education. After she earned her graduate degree in education at the University of Delaware, she became an outreach counselor at Delaware State College (now Delaware State University), where she helped form an Upward Bound.
It got funded, and she became the program’s director for more than three years. She went on to other schools, eventually becoming the first director of admissions at Delaware College of Art and Design in 1996. She left that position in 2004 when she decided to become financial director there.
Over the years, she nurtured her love of art by studying the widely-admired painter Edward Loper, Sr.
Jim Newton, UD professor emeritus of black American studies and Haman’s former college teacher, says her interest in both education and art helped her mature.
“When she got involved with Ed Loper, though she wasn’t formally trained, he opened her eyes to a more classical, traditional approach, and she responded with zeal,” he says. “She has her hand in the arts as well as in college administration. I consider her as one of my better students in terms of intellect and the humanistic side of her.”
Haman’s work as an educator and as an artist has been recognized several times.
Last year, she received the Christina Cultural Arts Center’s Christie Award for her “Outstanding Achievement as an Artist,” and was inducted into the Delaware Women’s Hall of Fame in 2005.
For Kay Wood Bailey, also an artist and educator, it is in Haman’s combination of art with history that makes her unique.
“I admire her because she not only cares about her own art, she really does try to encourage young people to not only be interested in art but in history,” she says.
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Color has become almost everything to Haman.
It’s as though the stark lines marking off the objects within her still-lifes — from “Fractured Light” and “Exciting Knowledge” to “Painters Palette” and “When It’s All Over,” her favorite — act as sinewy cages for a mottled profusion of various shades of reds, blues, yellows and greens.
Edward Loper’s influence on Haman is palpable, and as rich as her favorite colors, cerulean blue and alizarin crimson.
Haman had painted before she began studying with Loper in 1985, and did very well, but after her tutelage with him, her art radically changed.
“He taught me to look not so much at the subject but at the color I see.”
A Loper original hangs above the fireplace mantle in the living room of the home she shares with her husband of 32 years, Andrew Haman, a college beau who wooed her to his love of jazz and plied her with Tootsie Pops, a weakness.
The painting, “View from Westover Hills,” is comprised of a myriad of reds, oranges, yellows, blues and greens that reveal a road under arching trees.
“I use it for inspiration,” Haman says, who trains several cone-shaped lights upon the work.
It may only be a coincidence, but staring at the Loper work from an adjoining wall hangs her self-portrait, a figure of mottled reds accenting a resolute — almost angry — gaze.
If the self-portrait looks back toward Loper for inspiration, it also looks forward to Haman, whose face, in the intervening decades since it was painted, has softened.
Haman’s face now seems more reflective of her daughter Andrea’s portrait of her, hanging opposite the self-portrait. That painting is childlike, suffused with lighter colors.
In the chasm of difference between the two paintings rears the head of the most essential way a mature painter sees differently than the rest of us, says Loper, one of Delaware’s premier fine artists.
“You can teach yourself to see color but you have to know that it’s there,” Loper says. “Paint is color, so if you’re painting, you paint the colors you see. I’ve been teaching people how to learn to see color and how to use certain things in your work, and Teresa has been a good student at that. “
For Haman, seeing more and richer shades of color also entails looking more deeply into everything.
“To be able to create is special,” she says. “It’s breathtaking how beautiful the world is.”
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Haman’s studio, in a chilly, unfinished basement, is filled with frames and finished and unfinished canvases, including original paintings, and the signed and numbered prints of the more popular ones that she sells.
“My paint is starting to get thicker,” she says. “I’m always hunting for color, and the more color there is, the more paint you use.”
She’s also getting more abstract, as though, beyond the objects, color itself has become the most important thing to be studied and interpreted.
Her latest work is an oversized still life she has yet to name, that includes within it her 1983 painting, “Ballerina.” The smaller canvas is now nestled in folded sheets, set beside a blue and white teapot, flowers, ballerina shoes and a pear.
She shines lights upon it from different directions, giving her eye a chance to see, both radically and subtly, different shadows and colors.
“It’s about relationships, too,” she says. “The way the pear looks near the teapot near the painting near the flowers near the sheet.”
She usually doesn’t sketch out her work. “When you draw, sometimes the structure gets in the way of the color,” she says. “I’m constantly working to find a color, but I also feel the tension of the subject.”
That is, no matter how important or imposing the color, she can’t stay away from history and the structure it imposes on daily life. It hits her in the face every day.
Ultimately, painting the roads of the Underground Railroad may be a metaphor for the tension in her personal life. Just like her love of color is.
Think about the folks who traveled the Underground Railroad to freedom, she suggests.
“They had to be creative, moving from one spot to the next, without being captured,” she says. “As I move from site to site, I’m moving like they were. It’s a constant looking at things from different perspectives, from within myself to what’s happening around me.
“Painting is a strong liberator. It helps you look at how beautiful life is, despite all the tension.”