Dr. Al Hurwitz remembers his first scribble.

“I was about four years old and we moved into a new house. The first thing I saw were all these wonderful white plaster walls. I had a pencil and I began drawing, I can still see the images of what I drew My mother was quite alarmed, but my father thought it was very amusing because it was all doomed to be papered.”

Many years later, 87 in fact, Mr. Hurwitz is still scribbling and teaching others the mechanics of children’s art. A prominent promoter of progressive art education, Mr. Hurwitz has taught art to students of every level, from elementary school to the Harvard graduate program. He has published several books that serve as the curriculum for art education, including Children and Their Art, which he coauthored and many in the field refer to as the most comprehensive textbook on the subject. He has also received numerous awards over the years from the National Art Education Association, including earlier this year the Elliot Eisner Lifetime Achievement Award.

Dr. Hurwitz draws on childhood influences. — Katie Ruppel

But back to scribbling. Last Thursday night, 91-year-old Mr. Hurwitz gave a talk at the Chilmark Public Library. To open the talk, he asked everyone to grab a crayon and doodle, scribble or scrabble for eight seconds. When he yelled “Stop,” the papers went up: Some were dramatic, others relaxed, some were chaotic and others were delicate.

“With the scribble, we have created a form that the world has never seen, in which it can never be repeated. It is totally unique in the way you all are totally unique,” he told the audience.

He explained that creating art is a biogenetic impulse that humans bring with them into the world. As children we first we identify our own hands, knuckles, wrists, elbows, then discover something to mark with, perhaps lipstick, chalk or ink, and then a canvas to mark on, such as mother’s dress, a dinner plate or the white plaster walls.

“This to me is a revelation,” he said. “You see something, and hold it like this in your hand, and then, my God, look, you’ve left a track on the world.”

Mr. Hurwitz has left plenty of tracks on the world, and more than just scribbles. The walls of his home in Chilmark are covered with paintings, each particular, or peculiar, frame fitting into the one beside it like a puzzle. A landscape of New Mexico, a budding springtime garden, a child’s stick figure and a portrait of his wife Helen all merge together to form both individual pieces and a united new work of art.

Following that first four-year-old scribble on the walls of his home, it was a seemingly direct line for Mr. Hurwitz’s career as an art educator and in the arts. At age nine he took his first art piece to a museum, in WWII he captured combat scenes in his sketchbook, and with war bonds he helped found one of the first off-Broadway theaters in New York city. Eventually he settled down to teach art in Miami, traveling up the grades from elementary to junior high to high school and then as the art supervisor for the district’s school system.

With no assistant and no office, this proved to be a challenge, but Mr. Hurwitz has always liked a good challenge.

“If you aim high and you fall, you’re still be ahead of most people,” he said.

The success of his work in Miami led to a position as art supervisor for the Newton Public School System in Massachusetts. During this period he simultaneously earned his doctorate in art education from Pennsylvania State University and served as an education associate for Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.

“Then, when I retired, that’s when I really began doing things,” he said.

After rebuilding the Art Education Department at the Maryland Institute College of Art, he served as president of the International Society for Education through Art from 1975 to 1978. During this time, he led tours and held conferences for teachers from around the world who otherwise would not have had the opportunity, most notably those from South Africa when the country was still under the apartheid system, and from Soviet Russia. He admires this accomplishment because he believes that simply talking with other artists about art is of equal importance to making it.

During his international travels he collected and studied children’s art from Egypt, Turkey, New Zealand, Soviet Russia, Finland and Iran, to name a few. He always looked forward to dropping in at local schools in the countries he visited to draw with the children.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say this focus on children and their art has kept Mr. Hurwitz in touch with his own inner child. Here he is describing the process of making art:

“Imagine, you start here at one point, and suddenly it’s circular. Your hand swings out into space and comes back to exactly where it started. And now with the circle you have access to the sun, to a face, to a flower, and if you combine it with the next discovery, the line, you have the beginning of quite an extensive vocabulary.”

In addition to teaching art he enjoys making it too. In January Mr. Hurwitz is having an art show, and he is currently working on a sequel to his book, King Kong Variations, in which he places the legendary ape in Zelig-like situations throughout time. He has also begun working on another book, his 12th, although this one is not about art.

“It’s about love and romance, don’t ask me why,” he said. “I don’t question things, when things hit me I answer the call and I’m glad I have the desire to do something.”

But for now it’s back one more time to the scribble.

“It’s never been done before, nothing will ever be like it again,” Mr. Hurwitz remarks about the seemingly innocuous first step in the life of an artist.

The same could be said of Al Hurwitz.