Notes on my orientation to classes.

I certainly understand why we sometimes go from class to class looking for answers to the questions arising within our studio life. It’s not those questions per se that are the problem, but rather how we respond to them. Ultimately the most meaningful responses are the ones that you, acting as your own midwife, struggle to bring to life. What I can do is to encourage you to face risk and uncertainly as necessary and even desirable conditions, and to assist with developing the tools needed for you to acquire the confidence to keep going in the studio as the path further into your own voice.

Without exception, being stuck or backed into a corner in the studio is something that happens to us all. Sometimes we get a flat tire or run out of gas or whatever, but just as in life outside the studio we subscribe to AAA to help us out when we need it, so in the studio we have inner AAA to help us when our battery dies or gas tank is on empty. And learning how to access that place is part of our growth.

Observation is at the heart of these classes and the emphasis is on re learning how to pay attention.  And by paying attention I don’t mean attention only to art, but also to the world right in front of your eyes. Because what else is the point of art or the purpose of art if not to turn your gaze back to the world in front of your eyes, because how they interpret what they see and feel is then the fuel for igniting the world within you. It is the intersection of those two worlds that we will examine. 

We look out onto and into the visible world because it is full of the most remarkable possibility, IF we can see it. Much of the time we don’t see what is there because we are distracted by ideas and expectations. These classes examine the possibility of seeing beyond expectation by rooting yourself in curiosity, risk and improvisational visual thinking.

Degas said, ‘I must impress upon myself that I know nothing at all, for that is the only way to make progress.’

And in a related way we might ask ourselves the question, how do I come to know what I don’t even know is there?

Some comments on Zoom teaching.

I began teaching on Zoom in the early summer 2020, with life as we knew it evaporated and no other way of working with people. Considering the obvious downsides and deficiencies of this mediated platform I moved ahead with great reluctance. Before that, for 20 years I’d been doing classes in live time and I knew from the beginning of the quarantine that there is no way to translate into zoom what happens when live. However, after the first zoom class in June, I was converted to the possibility of using it for something other than what it is not. And I came to recognize that with 12 people on zoom in guided and intimate conversational format, we can explore huge possibility and shape a very rich experience, if we can proceed without the expectations from the past to hamper the promise of possibility now.

A very wise person said, and I’m paraphrasing, ‘it’s what’s in your way that causes you to find another way’ and that is really where we are at right now. I cannot say that what you are getting on zoom is the same as when live in field or studio, however this new path has proven itself and the classes and participants have been deep and energetic. 

The kinds of questions these classes address.

Where does your eye go first?

How do you see what you don’t know is there?

What is something other than it’s name in words?

Are you able to root yourself in the saturation of the visual moment, or are you distracted by ideas and conditioning?

Is drawing a daily practice and one you can swim fluidly in?

What can a pencil do besides writing the names of things?

Within the grip of the observational moment, what is attracting you and what is holding you? And while holding a pencil or brush, can you allow yourself to travel in the narration of that moment without expectations of outcome?

How tuned are you to the choreography of your decision making?

Where do you begin a drawing and do you begin the same every-time?

How do you move within pictorial space? Quickly or slowly?

Are you aware of your inner eye?

Have you cultivated visual memory?

In the studio do you allow yourself to follow a scent in a way that might carry you away from your expectations, or do you play it safe?

What are your tools for stretching your imagination? And can you follow your own improvisational curiosity?

Do you trust you own way even if it seems unpredictable? Or do you follow what others say because they seem to know the answers?

Are you able to move fluidly within uncertainty or do you demand answers?