I have always been a maker. A maker of sketches, lists, loaves of bread, poems, collages, prints, paintings, lesson plans and classroom cultures. Except in sleep, my hands move.
To maintain a personal artistic practice in the midst of a full-time career in art education is to live a layered identity. While challenging, to do both is to engage in a constant stream of experimentation. Students’ hands too are in constant motion, with their fingers on the pulse of new ideas and technology. Their gestures are courageous in defiance of old patterns of thought and action, inviting me to create with them at the edge of what is known.
To work each day in a studio art classroom situated in a diverse public high school just outside of Baltimore is to facilitate a makerspace in the truest sense. I am surrounded at all times by the incidental by-products of creation and experimentation:
A magazine picture where a paintbrush has been set to rest becomes fodder for a new collage.
A student’s experiment with xerox manipulation to avoid the constraints of an assignment becomes a new process of reference image generation for prints and paintings.
A demonstration of an art technique gone awry becomes a new method of printmaking.
From these daily experiments and discoveries, layering has become a necessary and purposeful component of my personal artistic practice. Working in layers allows me to work quickly in the few spare moments that I am able to set aside on a given day, and then to return to the same piece on a different day with renewed vigor. Layering also holds meaning for me as a method of synthesis. As a reflective practitioner, I am continually attempting to synthesize my experiences with the layers of my identity and to derive new meaning and purpose from them-- a new way forward.
My most recent body of work began as mixed-media collages in my sketchbook, created from found classroom ephemera and fragments of collected images. I redrew the compositions onto matboard and incised the matboard to create alternative-process intaglio prints, over which I used wintergreen oil to selectively transfer color, pattern and texture from the original collages.