A Merciful Midterm Break: Art and Professor Life
Highlights from 8 Weeks of Life
There has been a particular intensity to this semester. It feels like anxiety is hanging in the air, has become a kind of molecule alongside the oxygen and we’re all breathing it in. It has also been the most intense flu/cold/covid/general-sickness season I have experienced as an educator. Like having half of my class out sick and students missing weeks of school kind of cold season.
The world is feeling crazy. I can only stomach so much of the news cycle right now. Instead of falling down the rabbit hole, I try to make my art classes a respite from all of that. I show my students work from many different artists, from artists of color, from queer and non-binary artists, from artists invested in environmental activism or activism against sexual violence. I am trying to counter the large measures of erasure happening at the federal and corporate scale with the things I can control: lectures, discussions, assignments, community. I am also using my own art practice to find some peace and feel sane in insane times. Making art makes me feel like I can breathe fully, like I have a chest-full of clean air.
We’re eight weeks in to our semester and I’m exhausted. I love my job and it is also intense to be an educator right now. My students are dealing with allot: trauma, housing issues, food insecurity. Sometimes as an educator it feels like you are in charge of the life raft and you have to try to patch holes in the life raft while also doing a song and dance to make everyone feel okay. There’s allot of holes being made in the life raft right now. Mercifully, it is now our spring break. I have the week to catch up, rest, and reflect. Here’s some highlights from these last eight weeks of life:
This semester I had the awesome opportunity to book a model that was 42 weeks pregnant. She joined my painting course for a clothed long pose session. It was so incredible to get the chance to draw her and I plan on making this into a larger painting. My students were soooo stoked to both draw and paint her.
Painting! These are paintings I created first as demos for my beginning painting students and that I finished with my students. I loved painting that sphere and little geometric snowman. As a young art student I never thought I would like still-life. My painting program in undergraduate didn’t focus on technical skill development and instead jumped into concept. When it came to figuring out how to paint I was left to figure it out on my own, free-range chicken style…which quite frankly led to some funky habits, like mixing all of my paint with my brush and having a disorganized palette out of not knowing any better.
When I was hired to teach my first painting class at the college level, I knew I wanted to help my students understand light logic, paint mixing, color theory, composition. I wanted to cover the skills as a way to empower students and give them options. I worked with my mentors from graduate school to develop my first painting curriculum and began making still life paintings as a way to teach value structure, composition, paint application…and I discovered that what I had once assumed would be boring wasn’t at all. When you learn all of the different elements of the shadow family and light family and watch how those values play out across an object is is beautiful. It changes how you see the world and what you see as beautiful.
Here are some recent gouache studies. I’ve been making these pages filled with mini-paintings and I find them so satisfying. Some may become larger gouache pages or oil paintings. Making these pieces on a page together makes me consider variety; getting variety in color, values, varying my compositions. It is also nice to be able to make a little painting in-between a packed work day. I need some creativity that feels like my own everyday. Here are some sketchbook pages too of daily drawings. I love drawing things around me, sneaking in drawings during work meetings.
The kitties have been especially cuddly recently. I think part of it is the colder temperatures, but I think part of it too is that they know I need some cuddles. They’re emotional little creatures.
I am teaching printmaking this semester. I love teaching printmaking, diving into all of these different ways of making has my brain lighting up with creative excitement. Relief print, intaglio, collagraphs, screen-printing. It is all so fun and I love seeing what my students make. There is a really funny thing that happens in my printmaking class that feels special and particular to the medium. Students work on their blocks or plates and there is this excitement and anticipation of what the print is going to look like. They go through the inking process, send it through the press, and then go to pull that print…they gasp, excited with what the final print looks like. Their classmates hear the gasp and rush over to see it. They huddle together around the press excited and exclaiming. It is so funny and it warms my heart. That’s what teaching is all about.
What’s on my easel right now: A Bounty of Cactus
I am so excited to start this oil painting. We’re in Salt Lake for a short trip right now, but the moment I’m back in my studio I am starting in on the oil layers for this piece. The composition has a range of cactus and desert plants from our garden: prickly pear, red hot chili poker cactus, desert trumpet, and a Joshua Tree. I love how this little gouache study came out and I am eager to see how it translates into oil.
Thank you for reading y’all. I’d love to know your thoughts on my recent work. Reach out and take care.
-Chloe