William Brincka’s classroom could be a beach or a steel mill, where he would encourage his art students to see the beauty in a simple weed or the pouring of steel.
He wanted them to connect with their environment and reflect that in their work for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
“He taught more about living, loving and being than just art,” said former student Ginni Guzior, now an art teacher herself.
Mr. Brincka, 74, a longtime professor at the School of the Art Institute, died Tuesday, Sept. 25, in St. Anthony Memorial Health Center in Michigan City, Ind., of heart failure.
Raised in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood, Mr. Brincka was the only child of Slovak immigrants who owned a butcher shop. His grade-school teachers noticed that the boy who produced his own puppet shows for the class seemed to have an unusual talent for art. He was enrolled in Saturday classes at the Junior School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
As a teenager, he developed a deep interest in plants, riding his bike each weekend to the Morton Arboretum in Lisle to take a horticulture class intended for teachers.
After graduating high school, Mr. Brincka joined the Navy. Even aboard an aircraft carrier in World War II, he created art out of his surroundings, using items he found on the ship to build an altar for an impromptu midnight mass one Christmas. On Easter, he used typewriter paper to make lilies to decorate the wood-carved altar he made for the ship, said his longtime companion, Basil Cross.
After the war, he started studying to become a doctor, but returned to art at the School of the Art Institute. His studies were again interrupted by war. He served from 1952 to 1954 in the Korean War, then returned to the school to complete a master’s degree. He became a full-time faculty member in 1958, teaching three-dimensional design and sculpture.
He moved to Porter County, Ind., in 1961 and started on a lifelong project to link his two interests by designing a 7-acre garden on the property. Garden groups from as far away as North Carolina would come for tours of his work, which included an evergreen garden whose colors, despite the absence of flowers, wowed guests, friends said.
“He really transferred all of his talent and interest in art to his garden,” said Leah Balsham, a colleague from the school.
He also was a successful plant hybridizer. His knowledge of art and plants helped him to connect to the foreign places he loved to visit. He could look at the plants he saw on a trip and rattle on about the environment, making his partner wonder whether he had read up on their destination.
“He would say, `Through arts and plants, you are never a stranger anywhere in the world,'” Cross said.
Mr. Brincka retired in 1992. He still surrounded himself with students, who easily befriended the teacher who might be at a Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert one night and at a rock concert the next.
There are no other immediate survivors. Visitation will be held from 6 to 8 p.m. Saturday and from 2 until the time of services at 4 p.m. Sunday in Carlisle Funeral Home, 613 Washington St., Michigan City, Ind.
