I have been nurtured well! Childhood experiences, travel, an exigent professor, and now students who challenge, question, and inspire.
My brothers and I spent half of our childhood in San Francisco's famed Golden Gate Park, just two blocks from our family flat. We explored the museums, including their dumpsters, we skated to Stowe Lake, the zoo, even down to the beach on our Union Hardware #5's...I once tried the "Big Hill, the one from Sutro's Bath's to Play Land. It was on a dare of course and though my skate key chipped; my tooth it was worth it! I was a hero.
We pretended to drink tea in the Japanese Garden, our pinkies extended. I swirled and curtsied on the stairs of the Legion of Honor, just like Loretta Young. I talked to The Thinker, made up funny stories to make him smile (my brothers laughed). I was fairly certain he was pondering where he had put his clothes.
Well, even after all these years, those weekend and summer excursions remain so precisely etched in my memory and my heart that they provide a rich and magical source for much of my art today.
The adventures continued with two beautiful daughters of my own, a captive audience that begged for more explorations and more stories. This provided more fertile soil for my paintings. When our young family moved to Europe, we found a new source of museums, cathedrals, and antiquated cities to explore. We visited castles, climbed Cathedrals, hiked Volksmarches throughout Western Europe, and both daughters found new creative interests, dance and flute. Creative seeds were planted for us all. I painted them both throughout their childhood and paint from those memories still.
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Now I teach full time, Music, Art, Drama, and Dance. You might think I have another captive audience but instead I am the one that is captivated. My student inspire and challenge me. They are sponges for art history, from traditional to contemporary styles and with 500 plus students, certainly a variety of interests as well. I have explored new medium, colored pencils to markers, art forms, from cartooning to conceptual, even performance art.
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Teaching a class of emerging percussionists |
I have been introduced to student generated subject matter, like dragons, duck stamps, amusement parks, coupled with traditional subjects like landscape, still life, and portraits. You could say that I have been exposed to art like the poster I once had of the mayor of Portland I believe, wearing only a raincoat and flashing a Henri Moore sculpture. I have experienced students' incredible spontaneity and joy when working on their art and have come to
appreciate and understand my own passion. We are the sum total of our life experiences and I communicate them best, through paper, canvas, and paint.
Last, I have been blessed with a mentor, an incredible artist who models life-long learning. He never stops exploring, studying, experimenting; he never settles for what he could easily reproduce in his sleep or for what might be the most marketable. A mind constantly inquiring, experimenting, and stretching, personifies creativity and that is what I hope for most in my own life's work, whether in my teaching or in my art for that is what I believe defines the work "artist."
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