KURT COBAIN: Art teacher finds 'phenomenal' sketch

ABERDEEN, Grays Harbor County (AP)  One of the sketches Kurt Cobain drew for a high school art class has been rediscovered at the late grunge rock star's alma mater.

Bob Hunter, Cobain's former art instructor at Aberdeen High School, last week found the drawing that depicts sperm evolving into babies. Hunter said the drawing was "phenomenal" because of the enterprise and originality in the work.

"I find it amazing that someone that age could go and do that," Hunter said. "It was totally different from anything anyone else was doing for that assignment. There's a lot more going on in this person's head."

Cobain, lead singer of the hugely popular rock band Nirvana, committed suicide by shooting himself in the head with a shotgun. His body was discovered April 8 in his Seattle home.

The artwork, which Cobain drew in 1984 for an assignment about metamorphosis, has certain similarities with the artwork he prepared last year for the cover of Nirvana's hit record "In Utero."

Cobain was known as a compulsive doodler as a teen-ager, but the hordes of national media that have descended on Aberdeen over the past two weeks have failed to turn up any of his other early artwork.

The sketch that Hunter found in a storage room might become a valuable collector's piece, although experts say its monetary value is uncertain at the moment.

"We usually don't have much luck" with memorabilia unrelated to a famous person's career, said Lauren Bresnan, a clerk at Sotheby's New York office in a telephone interview.

Hunter, who was invited to a private memorial service for Cobain last week in Seattle, has gone as far as placing the piece in a bank safe deposit box.

Cobain drew the unsigned work when he was a junior. He printed his name on it and the grade Hunter gave him, an A+, is on the back.

Although Cobain dropped out of Aberdeen High School, he gave Hunter the sketch to use as an example for future classes.

Over the past 10 years, Cobain's untitled piece has been lost a couple of times in the high school's art storage rooms, Hunter said.

After it was missing for about six years, it turned up when Hunter was moving art from one room to another about three years ago.

This time around, the sketch resurfaced under a stack of old projects on a high shelf in a storage room.