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ARTIST STATEMENT
My passion for the visual world and the pursuit of making images began at any early age and has motivated my work as an artist. How images evoke memory, create metaphor, capture a relatedness between viewer and artist, awaken an aesthetic response has been an ongoing investigation. I work primarily from observation, often using my own photographs, as well as newspaper images and works of other artists, historical and contempoary, as source material. A series of paintings usually evolves from a metaphoric theme, a pictorial problem of light and space or a dialogue created between abstraction (flat surface) and representation (illusion of form).
Drawing plays an important part in my creative process, whether to sharpen my perceptions or to discover the callagraphic mark underlying a gesture. The paintbrush becomes a way to draw-in-paint, dancing over the surface, that combines intensive layering of transparent paint with areas of thicker, more gesturally applied paint. Color relationships are key to building a palette for each painting, not only in blending pigments together, but creating optical color effects that illuminate the paint from within. I am interested in how to combine the techniques of the Old Masters with modernist aesthetics, so that the surface of the painting becomes as rich as the image it conveys.
The human dilemma expressed through anatomical gesture would be the simplest way to describe my current work. It was during my graduate studies in figurative painting that I became deeply involved in the beautiful complexity of rendering the human body. I drew bones, painted from cadavers, and studied the art of the Renaissance in order to find that moment of the “telling” gesture that reveals humanity through the human form. How to convey the unique qualities of a person set within the context of the universal human drama, the expression of their individuality, is more important to me in a portrait, then who they are as a social identity.
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TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
The value of study in drawing and painting is that it provides a foundation for integrating the external world with human consciousness. As an educator, I aim to promote within the student an aesthetic intelligence through a series of learning phases that includes perceptual training, technique, historical awareness and critical analysis.
My role as a teacher is to help direct a dynamic between sensitive observation and invention with a considered use of materials. Lessons guide the student towards sharpening their observational skills, organizing their perceptions into compositions and refining their judgment. Because the process of drawing and painting reveal the thinking of the artist, students can witness and confront their limits and preconceptions concerning their points of view. As their skills develop, they discover how their experiences, emotions, personal sensibilities or ethnicity can play a part in their choices, infusing their work with memory and imagination.
To be productive, students must first gain a sense of mastery using traditional artists’ materials in order to fully realize the work’s communicative capabilities. I encourage students to expand their range of techniques in terms of clarifying their artistic decision making—not to get stuck with one tool or method as the only solution. Because drawing and painting skills require persistence and discipline, the student must learn to recognize the value of their effort in relation to their achievement.
An emphasis on the continuity of art history from the Ancients to contemporary artists is an important part of my teaching. I encourage students to discover links between their work and the past by looking to the masters for solutions in their own work today. Museum visits and visual presentations using slides and books assists in developing student skills of interpretation and discernment while building an awareness of cultural values and traditions.
I believe that sharing ideas through the critiquing process is an important part of developing a student’s critical sensibilities. Open dialogue promotes skills in verbal expression of conceptual ideas, allowing students to learn from one another’s work and to become more aware of the criteria by which their work is viewed and judged by others.
The practice of art-making provides an important element in humanistic understanding that is all the more needed in an increasingly technical world. The benefits, whether part of liberal arts education or a life-long pursuit, prepares students with the means to both create and analyze using a developed visual language, an expression of their ideas, identity and culture.
Teaching Philosophy in printable pdf
