Artistic Vision

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Ouch …

September 28, 2010 at 5:30 am · Filed under Art, Family, Random

I know I have been delinquent in posting. My family and I were in an auto accident at the end of July. Fortunately, my wife and two kids were unharmed. Sadly, I suffered some internal bleeding and a lacerated spleen. After being in the hospital for four days (with my spleen intact!), I was discharged and homebound for three weeks. While homebound, I was hoping to get some painting done. Unfortunately, other accident-related issues came up that completely took the wind out of my sails.

The last week of August brought teacher orientation. The first day of school followed the week following. It was a long end of Summer to say the least. But, again, I  remain so very thankful for the Lord’s provision for me and my family during that time.

All of this being said, I did finish two small pieces and started another. I’ll post them shortly. I wanted to simply put the word out that I did not drop off the face of the earth.

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Art is Solitary (Sports vs. The Arts, Part 5)

January 29, 2010 at 2:07 am · Filed under Art, Art Education, Random, Sports

In my last post—sorry for the length—I touched on a few observations I had for my students when they stated that art was hard and that was one of the reasons why they believed kids prefer sports to art. That may be a piece of it, but I think there is another component that plays a significant role: sports, especially in neighborhoods, build camaraderie and friendship—both of which are positive and powerful intrinsic motivators. I believe this motivation is a key component that drives sports involvement up while visual arts involvement down.

Drawing, painting and many other visual arts aren’t group activities. Rather, they are solitary endeavors that pull you away from friendships of the nature you see develop on neighborhood courts and ball fields. A monthly meeting or weekly painting group meets briefly. Suffice it to say, artists aren’t known for playing well together. Artistic temperament aside, developing a craft requires hours of practice that rarely involves others except when feedback is being sought.

Easy Access

Think about it: sports friendships are not only built around playing together but also joining in to watch a favorite team or complain about a favorite player’s recent slump. So, we find those friendships on the court being nurtured by weekly get-togethers to watch games that are on at all hours throughout the day and night thanks to the preponderance of cable sports channels.

Such venues simply don’t exist for visual artists. (If I’m wrong, please let me know!) If nothing else, I find that many visual artists, in an effort to practice their craft, turn the TV off not on.

A Final Note

Consider that there is little change in the individual sports enthusiasts’ friendships as aging occurs. Friends may move away but they still text or talk about “the game” or a favorite player. They may even participate in the same fantasy league together. Lifestyles change but, again, that doesn’t inhibit the core value of the friendship.

With art, there exists the fear of diminishing returns. As an artist moves through different stages of life (job, marriage, family), he may find it more difficult to pursue his art and so see his skills deteriorate. Because of the isolation, it can become easy to withdraw further instead of fight your way back to the level of proficiency you once had. And, as my students rightly say, art is hard.

My next post will touch upon contemporary culture’s influence on the minds of students.

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Pleasing the boss or, the pain of overcommitment

October 21, 2009 at 10:07 pm · Filed under Art, Art Education, Education, Random and tagged: , ,

Last year, I did a “quilt” project with Trish Maunder, who works with the Faith Ringgold Foundation. Trish does her own story quilt idea in school classrooms. During that time she also educates students about Faith and her story quilts.

Students pick a theme and then each student translates that theme into a personalized image. They also need to pick a famous quote or write a poem to accompany their image. The pieces are glued onto a larger piece of canvas with fabric strips covering the seams and then a fabric border is set around the whole thing. They turn out really well.

Well, the founder of my school saw the quilt my class did and wanted another one to auction off at an annual fund-raising event. Long story short, I exploded the original idea into a series of smaller quilts based on the founding principles of the school’s charter IN ADDITION TO the large quilt that would document the school’s growth from conception to fruition. It’s moments like that where I think to myself, “I know, let me put this bag over my head so you can all beat me with a stick.”

Well, the students let me down at the end of last year and I didn’t get much done. So, I ended up having to hijack my two painting classes to complete the work. It’s going to take the entire quarter to get all of the quilts done. I’m just hopeful that when they are all put together that they are strong pieces. Of course, they better sell too! LOL!

Friends tell me they get roped into doing things like this too. Why do we, as art teachers, fall for this stuff? I know on some level I liked the original idea and wanted to see it come to pass. In the end, though, I need to remember my ADD tendency to over-commit. It’s during those moments that I need to remind myself to be practical and realistic. In the end, I know my students better than any administrator because I work with them every day.

So, lesson learned. In the end, though, I’m thankful to 1) have a job and 2) have a job teaching art.

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2009 Art Educators of New Jersey Fall Conference

October 17, 2009 at 3:24 pm · Filed under Art, Art Education, Continuing Eduation, Education, Random and tagged: , , ,

I came back from this year’s Art Educators of New Jersey Fall Conference with some new things to think about. I have to admit to wondering what this year’s conference was going to be like since the State refused the petition for a waiver for schools to cover overnight stays. But, the hotel was booked and things seemed just as crowded as last year.

While my school couldn’t cover my stay at the hotel, they did cover my food, tolls, registration/membership and mileage. The mileage coverage will bring my car rental to about $2-3. (My car has 195k miles on it and the engine smokes if I drive it longer than 15 minutes. LOL!)

I have to admit that one of the classes I signed up for was a dud primarily because the instructor for the class left too much time (an hour and a half) for “playing” and “experimentation” versus walking us through doing certain techniques with the medium. To me, direct instruction in those venues seems to have more value for participants. But, that’s me.

The non-hands on wire animal sculpture session was great and is something I can immediately bring to my classes this year. This plus a couple of other events made it a worthwhile adventure.

I’d love to be able to go to the National Art Educators Conference in Baltimore next year but I can’t swing being away from the family. Plus, my school probably won’t foot the bill. I may try to get there for a day. We’ll see.

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Obama’s victory: Republican hubris, Christian ignorance

November 6, 2008 at 3:26 pm · Filed under Blogroll, Faith, Family, God, Politics, Pop Culture, Random, Uncategorized and tagged: , , , , , , , , , ,

As I reflect upon the resounding (and expected) victory of Barack Obama in his bid for the Presidency, I am piggy-backing upon my thoughts from my last post. I commented that there was a high degree of emotionalism that drove Obama’s campaign both in political and popular circles. I want to undergird that statement with a couple of other thoughts on why I think Obama so resoundingly won.

First, I think Republican hubris played a huge role in the Democrat (and Obama’s) rise to power. Beginning in 2006 with losses in both the House and the Senate, the Republicans began their steady downward spiral to where they are today. They squandered their opportunity when they were in the same position that the Dems will be in after January. They, ironically, conducted themselves as traditional Democrats and increased the size of government, violating that and other core conservative values. They appeared to believe themselves untouchable. Sadly, they found out they weren’t.

George Bush, in his last four years in office, also squandered much (though hampered in the last two years with an oppositional House and Senate). He simply didn’t do much to further conservative thought and remained, in my mind, aloof as the figurehead of the Republican party. The public’s view of him as everything wrong with our country (not a fair estimate, but understandable) hurt any chance for a Republican to take office. (Ironically, we’ll see how the Dems spin the fact that they have control of both Houses and the Presidency but ALSO have such low approval ratings—even lower than Bush’s.)

Second, and most importantly, I believe the election of Barack Obama had much to do with the failure of the Church to effectively communicate its message to it’s own people. Yes, I didn’t say communicate its message to the World, but to its OWN people—both black and white. While I recently heard that polls indicate that the African-American vote helped Obama, it didn’t put him over the top. There wasn’t a significant increase, overall, in the number of black voters (with the increase coming from in younger voters). Rather, it was white independents and moderates who elected Barack Obama. Nevertheless, I find two points interesting.

First, the African-American community as a whole votes very traditionally on issues such as family and abortion. Ironically, they selected a candidate who is anything but traditional. Did the A-A community know Obama’s stances and voting history on these core moral issues? Or, was it more that they chose to overlook it—much like most of America—in favor of economy and the prize of having a black President? My own experience in urban education leads me to believe that they abdicated their role as salt and light to the World in favor of race. That’s a harsh statement, but, as I indicated, it holds true to what I hear consistently in my all-minority school.

As I indicated previously, polls show that moderates and independents won this election for Obama. Most of those were white. The present state of the mainline Protestant and Catholic churches also shows a clear willingness to PUT ASIDE mandates about life and the family in favor of progressive politics. After all, in their view, times change and the Word of God is a book written by men that must be revisited as society evolves.

I wonder what would happen if evangelical churches made their focus—over the next four years—one of educating their congregations about the core values of the Christian church. Because the Church has a different vocabulary—a different way of looking at the World—our account of life and meaning is vastly different. I have to agree with Robert Lewis Wilken:

Nothing is more needful today than the survival of Christian culture, because in recent generations this culture has become dangerously thin. At this moment in the Church’s history in this country (and in the West more generally) it is less urgent to convince the alternative culture in which we live of the truth of Christ than it is for the Church to tell itself its own story and to nurture its own life, the culture of the city of God, the Christian republic.

I can’t help but wonder what would happen in the 2010 and 2012 elections if the Church was grounded in this way.

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