Gathering Artisans Collective

In 2020, COVID inspired the Green family, who were each working independently, to adapt and collaborate. James, a painter who’s been teaching art for over 20 years, got over his aversion to online teaching. Clarice, baking since she was a kid and selling cakes as an adult, tapped into her teaching skills from homeschooling their son, Jafar, to offer baking classes. Jafar’s musical talent gave way to teaching, and the three became the Gathering Artisans Collective (GAC). GAC offers recorded classes for self-paced learning, live virtual classes, and in-person classes for fine art, baking, and music.

James’s paintings decorate the walls of the Green home, including multiple Girl with a Pearl Earring–inspired works, for which Clarice was the subject. “She’s my pearl, I have a great prize,” he said about his wife. She laughed back at him, saying he would get an extra slice of her freshly baked blueberry grunt, her version of morning coffee cake.

It’s not hard to imagine that the two celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in 2022 and that they were high school sweethearts in the small town of Evansville, Indiana. They married at 19, after which James started working at an airline, which allowed them to travel around the country. A few months after Jafar was born, the family moved to California for James’s job. Clarice worked days as a nurse, James worked swing shifts at the airline—alternating between work and staying home with Jafar. “Baking was always in there,” Clarice said of how she continued making cakes for her family and people at church.

Clarice quit nursing to homeschool Jafar. As Clarice taught Jafar, she learned how to teach. Additionally, she learned more about baking, reading books on the subject as she and Jafar spent hours at the library together. Then Clarice started making and selling cakes. At first, she focused on taste, until she realized, “It can’t just taste good, because people eat with their eyes. It’s got to look good.” James described how Clarice uses dark chocolate instead of flour to dust the pan for her milk chocolate pound cake. “So when you cut it open, you’ve got this light brown on the inside, but you’ve got this really dark edge on the outside. And for me as an artist, that contrast is just, ‘Wow.’ ” Clarice explained, “It just comes. That’s just the creativity that we all have…we just grow into it more and more.”

“Our son is a musician through and through,” Clarice said about Jafar. When he was about seven or eight, he chose to go to a Stevie Wonder concert at Disneyland. Jafar took piano, guitar, and voice lessons growing up and excelled in plays. These days, Jafar is an avid vinyl collector, record buyer for a record store, co-host of the Def Perspective podcast, and guitar teacher.

James has drawn ever since he was a kid and started taking art classes at community college in 1990. He started teaching art part-time in 2002. His layoff in 2011 from the telecommunications company he was working at was the catalyst for him to pursue art full-time. After so many years of teaching across the Bay Area, James runs into former students, even across multiple generations, everywhere he goes. He teaches art from “conception to presentation,” meaning students learn how to frame their finished art. He most appreciates serious students because they push him. “I have to go take a class to learn something to come back and offer them something else.”

Clarice takes students from not knowing anything about baking to making their own cakes. She started baking as a little kid with her mom in the kitchen. To have enough Christmas cookies for her and her four siblings and the rest of their family, they baked for two weeks straight, starting the day after Thanksgiving. Her mom wrapped the cookies nicely and hid the box from the kids, sometimes unsuccessfully. In her baking classes, Clarice starts with the basics, like what flour to use. Students choose what kind of cake and frosting they want to make. If she’s not familiar with something, she researches it and tries it out on lucky taste-testers James and Jafar. James said the Green family behind GAC are “lifetime students in a sense, learning but also learning people.” The more they learn, the more they can be creative resources for people.

“People don’t care how much you know, they want to know you care,” James said. He talked about vulnerability, being open to learning because everyone has something to teach. “I tell my students all the time, ‘I learned how to draw a perfect circle from a nine-year-old little girl’…and it works. It works for other nine-yearolds, it works for eighty-year-olds.”

Clarice eloquently summarized GAC with encouragement applicable to any creative: “there’s somebody that needs what you have.” C