At 90, artist and teacher Lois Horne has lost most of her friends, but her sense of wonder about the world remains, and her passion for art and education is very much alive. Her body may have slowed, but her sense of humor and the twinkle in her eye remain intact.

Born May 28, 1915, Horne was raised in a rural farming area in South Carolina during the Great Depression. Times were hard. At 17, her parents gave her permission to move to Louisiana to help relatives with a newborn baby.

"You can imagine, the heavens opened," says Horne. In such an impoverished time, she had harbored no hope of ever going to college, but with her relatives' help, she attended Louisiana Polytechnic Institute and later earned a fellowship to Louisiana State University to complete her M.F.A. "I think I was the only one in the whole tribe who had gone on to a master's degree," she says, smiling.

After teaching in schools in Texas and Louisiana, she applied for a job and was hired by Kamehameha Schools in 1946 to teach elementary art classes. She taught there for 33 years.

In 1968, Reinhold Book Corp. published her book about the art program she ran at Kamehameha Schools — "Painting for Children: A Collection of Paintings Done in the Classroom by Children from Five to Twelve." Horne sparkles when she turns the pages, probably much like she sparked the creative spirit in many children's lives.

Although she freely admits that she was never "one of the art elite" in Hawai'i, she participated in the local art scene, exhibiting in Island galleries and juried exhibitions.

Her retrospective at the Gallery on the Pali illustrates in watercolor, acrylic, photographic collage and mixed media her fascination and enthusiasm for the world.

Q. What made you interested in art?

A. When I was little, my greatest passion in life was working with crayons. That was all we had. A lot of times, we didn't even have paper and would work on what was available. I've always been interested.

Q. Why brought you to Hawai'i?

A. Friends had been out here during the war and they encouraged me to apply to schools here. The only thing I really knew about Hawai'i was what I studied with my fourth-grade class in Texas. It's interesting how simple, ordinary things determine a person's life. Kamehameha Schools hired me in 1946.

Q. What was teaching here like back then?

A. Kamehameha had teachers' cottages on the Bishop Museum grounds. They had taken the dormitories from the old Kam school and housed soldiers during the war. After the war, they converted those dormitories into little apartments so that people who came to teach could get affordable housing. Otherwise, we couldn't have made it. I made $2,300 for 10 months' work. The beauty of it was, you were five minutes away from your first class. At the time, there wasn't a single other school that was doing what we were in the classrooms, with the freedom we had. My years up there couldn't have been any better.

Q. How did the book come about?

A. Well, the first time someone asked me to write a book, I said I couldn't do it, because in the afternoon I have changed some of the ideas I had in the morning. Later on, one of the teachers went to work for Random House. She told them how unique our school was, and they wrote to me and asked me if I would write a book. So I did. I spent a summer closeted in one of the rooms getting it together. It dealt with the philosophical and psychological parts of what art is. Art comes from in here (she points to her chest) added with this (she points to her head). Children thrive on it. You know, I never had a misbehavior in class. Not one.

Q. Your artwork focuses on nature and the patterns in nature. What appeals to you about that?

A. I see some sort of relationship, a combination of natural forms, which fit together and form a pattern. Not necessarily a locked-in, mathematically repeated pattern, but patterns that are fluid and don't repeat themselves in a way you could define as a pattern. I think that is probably the thing that appeals the most.

Q. With your years of teaching experience, what advice would you give teachers today?

A. Basically, teach the child to see. Open their eyes to the mystery and the wonder of things we are surrounded by. Look at a leaf and ask yourself, "How can anything be as intricately constructed as that leaf and get its nourishment from a root that is way down there in the ground?" Open their eyes and encourage them to use all of their senses, every one of them.

I don't think our schools do their part, I really don't. I don't think many parents do either. I think if the teacher is alive, the children will be alive. They need to have some time when they have a chance to share things. Every day with my class, we would have a little discussion. I'd ask, "Tell me something unusual that you saw since you were here last — from any world — mechanical, business, nature, whatever."