Express

These paintings were created out of working through my feelings. Art is where I turn when I have strong feelings to work through and I have found myself in my painting studio often this spring, as I contemplate budget cuts to education on the federal, state, and local levels and what that actually means for my students. 

Develop Craft

The best way to get better at something is to practice, but it isn’t always easy to know what I want to create, especially when I am upset. So for these paintings I started with colors that spoke to my mood and blended them together.

Understand Art Worlds

During my whole teaching career I have worked with underprivileged students, the students who are the least likely to have access to the arts outside of school. However access to the arts is often the first thing taken away when there are budget issues. Research has shown that engagement with the arts strengthens critical thinking skills, enhances writing quality and early reading skills, improves test scores, helps multi language learners acquire language skills, increases academic achievement, and increases students’ civic engagement outside of school. And yet when we talk about what matters in education, all we talk about is reading and math scores. There is so much more to educating a whole person than reading and math. This knowledge is where my mind was while creating these paintings.

Stretch and Explore

These paintings were developed very differently from how I normally paint. They started as dark moody colors blended together. I was painting feelings about decisions. Then the ovals of a variety of skin tones were added representing all the people these decisions were actually affecting. I still wasn’t sure where the paintings were headed as I added and dripped even more color over the top of the ovals. 

Engage and Persist

The ovals felt trapped to me. I also wasn’t sure where I wanted the paintings to end up or what I was trying to express. So I left the painting to sit for a while.

Reflect 

I thought about what art did for me and for so many people. While these paintings made a statement about feelings of other people being trapped in circumstances beyond my control, I didn’t want to leave them just being dark and sad. Through my reflections I decided I wanted to show the hope, liberation, and freedom that the Arts (specifically visual arts and music) bring to so many people: people who end up in careers related to the arts and people who don’t, but the arts kept them in school and gave them healthy outlets for tough feelings. 

Envision

I thought about the best way to visually represent this and settled on silhouettes of kids experiencing the arts. Kids are the people I work with and hope to impact, so they became the center of these paintings.

Observe

To create the silhouettes I had to find reference photos and observe the outline shapes of the children very carefully as I painted them. Then I grounded the children to the paintings by adding faint shadows under them.

I’ve organized my artist statement using “The Studio Habits of Mind” or the 8 things “artist’s do” in order to show my students that I practice what I teach.