Viewers approach the visual world with the expectation of receiving something. The experience of looking is simultaneously universal and exclusive. The universality exists in the transference of visual information; the exclusiveness pertains to what the individual intrinsically desires to gain from this information. Students often come to studio classes primarily as viewers with very specific ideas concerning what they value visually and what they in turn want to imbue within their own work. As a teacher, my job is to show students that the process of making art often varies significantly from the act of merely looking; making a work of art often becomes about imbedding visual information in a way that potentially slows, delays, or even denies the visual and conceptual conclusiveness of the particulars and instead affirms the underlying complexity and structure of a thing.

Part of this process involves encouraging a departure from much of the assumed knowledge that students have regarding the idea of art-making and of the visual world. On my part, this can be as fundamental as constantly making the assurance that drawing and painting are indeed things that can be learned, or as complex as communicating the notion that subject matter often obscures or mires our ability to visually navigate our own work.

As an artist, I notice in myself a way of looking at the world that resides in its abstractions and not necessarily in its objects. This way of looking removes me from the normal pattern of the viewer who seeks a particular type or tenor of visual gratification as it relates to subjectivity. This is something that I try to instill in my students early on. To look at a painting is to be aware of the painting as an entire entity. The skein of the paint, the quality of the brushwork, the minutia and the boldness symbiotically hold one another together and simultaneously provide resistance in order to produce a visual hierarchy of information. This way of looking affirms the dynamism of systems as well as the notion that things tend to be more complex than appearances often suggest. In this way, creating art becomes less of an arcane occupation and more viable in comparison to the social and cultural world that students tend to be awakening to during their college years.

Working from life and perception are paramount for contextualizing and developing an aesthetic as well as analyzing our natural impulses toward certain visual representations. In early studio classes students are more open to intuition but lack regard for its sources. They may flatten perspective in order to harmonize the angle of a table top with the picture plane. Similarly they may turn a figure in virtual space to emphasize its symmetry. It is a fascinating discovery for them to understand this impulse in relation to the geometry and symmetry of their own bodies and to the abundance of visually harmonic structures that exist in the natural world. Producing achromatic or local color relationships is another impulse that students often arrive with. It is my function to help them see in a way that is more antagonistic to their assumptions. When dealing with perception they must look more closely at the components that form an identifiable reality. Often, the high entropy present within an image is the driving force behind its allure and even behind what we perceive as its visual accord.

Teaching towards certain types of persuasions must never become coercive. Making good art is never formulaic. The tenacity of the individual must be a part of the experience and deserves preservation. I try to teach my students to respond to their senses and to trust their eyes: if light changes the color of white cloth to cobalt, then where is the sense in painting it white? Similarly, I try to help them discover an autonomous sense of what is right for their individual hand without it being prescribed or inhibited. A light touch never relegates an individual to hesitancy nor does a large, rough mark indicate laxity. The strong presence of intention on the part of the artist potentially transforms imagery into a visual experience for the viewer; from the beginning, students need to have an awareness of their objectives: this holds true formally as well as conceptually and can be the element that bridges the two .

I think that it is very helpful to contextualize imagery for students. When talking about art from any time period, there needs to be an awareness of the social context which informs or informed it. This helps integrate students into a tradition as well as give them a sense of agency in the present; they understand that the self-reflexive aspects of creativity are not arbitrary but that they generate from circumstance.

The same type of logical consideration can help students discern or become more aware of the formal choices that painting necessitates. In my classroom there is often a lot of talk about mark in correlation to what the mark indicates. I think it is important that students develop an appreciation for the capacity of their chosen materials and that they become discerning about there decisions with those materials. An image operates as an environment and materials and handling play a large role in setting a particular type of stage.

I think that the natural world offers a number of good foils for different painting and drawing objectives. I continually encourage students to find things that they enjoy looking at and to find out why these things are visually compelling for them as individuals. One of my students loved to watch cloud formations. I suggested that this could offer some type of muse to her artistically but that first she had to figure out if her interest was based in the subject matter or in the characteristics of the clouds. As is often true of such fascinations, she came to the conclusion that her fascination in the clouds didn’t reside in their ‘objectness’ but rather in their capacity for change, dynamism, and evolution as forms. I was thrilled with her conclusion and the way in which her recognition was indeed able to inform her work. She started looking in the way that an artist looks; she found a small part of her personal aesthetic, a particular type of thing, large and nebulous, that suddenly became relatable to her own mind and patterns of thinking on a intimate level. It is this way of looking that I hope to help students elucidate for themselves.