What I Know About Creating Artists — Including Myself.
I am primarily a self-taught artist and teacher. I have gone to college and have a master’s in education. I have a two-year art degree and have studied with established artists. I have a great foundation and the help of other teachers who have inspired me. However, most of my creative and successful teaching methods have come from my teaching and painting experience over 48 years. I learn from working with my students. My successes and mistakes have formed me. I am not a born artist; I had to grow from scratch. However, I have had the privilege of knowing some born artists, and I know the difference. It doesn’t mean it is easy for them, but I believe they come out of the chute with a sensibility that occurs like magic to most of us. I love creating art, so I do.
After taking an art class that inspired me and allowed me 24-hour access to the painting studio, I became a beginning artist in college. I bought canvases and painted on them. I didn’t know what I was doing and had no previous experience. My teacher encouraged me to keep going. I reveled in mixing colors, oils, acrylics, watercolors, and pastels and applying this to paper and canvas. My relationship with the blank canvas became a friend. I read over art books in the library, learning about old and new artists. My work was very rudimentary and geometric. I studied color in geometric paintings to gauge what colors did next to each other.
In my blog, I will start by writing about the different stages of becoming an artist. My experience teaching myself and others from scratch has taught me that anyone can become an artist because we all have something to say. It takes dedication and the willingness to start where most of us left off, roughly grade school.
Most of us can’t stand looking at our work as an adult when it resembles the work of a third grader. People often say, “All I can draw is stick figures.” I tell them if you want it, it is in you, but most people don’t believe it. Our educational system doesn’t teach art beyond grade school if that. So many of us wonder at some point what more there is to life. What more could I do with my life? Figure drawing, landscape painting, crafting, or artistic hobbies are a magnificent outlet and a pathway for getting to know ourselves better.
Beginning Artists, beware. It is easy to give up as a beginning artist, and it is very risky to take art classes and open ourselves to criticism that comes mostly from within and from comparing ourselves to others. First-time creators need encouragement and inspiration from a teacher who can discern their inherent expression and talents. Observing this from their first efforts is essential. It leads to honing their art with them, not for them. It requires openness on my part to encourage transparency and honesty on their part. Seeing a student’s tendency towards whimsy, serious art, or crafting will be teased out over time.
In 1993, I went to Bali and visited the village of Ubud. It changed my life forever, and I still long to visit again. I have dreamed of living there. In my observation, the Balinese are a very spiritual and private people. Reverence for nature and life is something they emit from their very cells. Everything around them personifies this reverence. Every home had an outdoor altar they blessed daily with fruit, flowers, and prayer. They are quiet, and their food is fresh and delicious. They greet you with a calm bow and eyes filled with compassion. In the city of Ubud, everyone is an artist, young and old.
I recently read an article by Mark Joseph Deutsch, Art of the Young. The Art of Everyone.
He says beautifully: “In Ubud, everyone is an artist; every village has mastered an art form. The skills and techniques are passed on from generation to generation, from a master to his students. The painters from Keliki, for example, start early in their lives and have apprentices as young as 7. They come after school and spend two hours a day under the tutelage of a painting master. In the beginning, the kids do rudimentary things like grinding pigments – only after a few months of apprenticeship are they allowed to draw or paint.”