I seek to provide a classroom in which artists are encouraged to take risks, try new things, experiment with tools and materials, encounter problems and design solutions. Through persistence, I would like to see students develop a confidence in their innate creativity, which will continue to play a crucial role throughout their academic lives and beyond.

 

While technique-driven instruction is at the heart of my pedagogy, I also feel it is very important to integrate instruction based on ideas. I include themes from the entire continuum of art, historic to contemporary, with the goal of unifying the various fundamental techniques, processes, and materials of art-making with the "big ideas" that artists and their work bring to the table.

 

Dialogue is an important part of the process as well, and opportunities to reflect, both individually and as a group, guides students toward the development and realization of their concepts. They begin to see and experience creative work, and thus the world around them a little differently, as participants in a constantly fluid and evolving visual culture.