The Balance Between Art Educator and Artist, Visual Journal Page, 2021

This Summer I joined a cohort of Art Teachers on a similar path to our masters. Our challenge was tackling MAT800: The Artist as Education Experience, a class examining the unique struggles and attributions that we face daily being artist-educators. Through this we examined our personal identities and unique artsy qualities then came to understand how these personal qualities shaped our professional teaching experiences. Our final show of work titled Post, showcases some of the beautiful work that can be created when you find balance between the dual roles of being a professional art teacher and a practicing artist. 

The final two art pieces I have created for this class take a look into my own creativity and daily practice. They take a stab at answering some of the questions that have come to my attention during MAT800 in relation to my personal art-making. What obstacles get in the way of reaching our creative goals? How can we expand on and honor small, daily creative moments? 

This class has encouraged me to dust off my container of oil paints and find the small daily workable moments. Although Summer is upon us and finding time is no hassle, I hope to find the magic “balance” between professional and personal when school resumes this Fall. Not creating means not fulfilling my life’s purpose, which is not an option. In an artist-educator's shoes the guilt of not creating runs deeper than the guilt of taking time to create.  

My first piece titled Obstacles is a play on some of life’s daily finest that get in the way - (That nighttime TV routine, the social media trap, and the daunting schoolwork list). Many of the things take place in the heart of the home, the living room. The place that tends to suck you in for the night. Vanitas, a genre of still life painting popular in the 17th century, was one of my inspirations for this piece. These symbolic works of art show the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death. Obstacles, similarly, includes underlying symbolic imagery meaningful in my life. The mallard ducks, mother fawn with baby doe, globe, technology, reflections, wine, eggs, heart, triangles, and rainbow all hold deeper meaning. With some of the larger themes themes being marriage, motherhood, and infertility. This piece is a play on both the daily obstacles that get in the way of creating art and my life's overarching obstacles.

My second piece titled Daily Creative Moments is a collective of 9 works of art that I squeezed into my daily routine, as a means for my own self-care. They were substitutions to the daily “obstacles” that can get in the way of creating. In order for some sort of daily creative practice like this to fit in my life while teaching I put a restraint on myself to use a maximum of one hour on each piece. These landscapes are painted with oils on an 8 inch square canvas. Landscapes are something I’ve always enjoyed painting whether from a photograph I’ve snapped or directly “en plein air”. These scenes have an interesting connection to my obstacles in that I challenged myself to take inspiration from the thing that was taking from me each night - social media. I hunted down some of my friends' best landscape postings and restricted myself to working only from what I found. This has been a fun experiment and I intend on surprising the owners with their coordinating painting.