ReVision 117 Progress: Drawing & Sewing Metal

Dear Laura,

I am feeling good that I am sticking to my studio schedule while being pulled in so many directions with my new teaching job.  I am really thrilled to have the opportunity to share what I know and the skills I have aquired over the years with the young women at Ashley Hall.

I often look to Parker Palmer for guidance on being a teacher and artist.  For me, it is essential that I do not lose myself in teaching, but keep my life balanced with my studio practice, not to mention nurture my loving relationships with my sons and husband. These are my priorities.  If you are reading this and feeling the same way, please check out Parker's wisdom at your local library. You won't regret it.

I am incredibly inspired by this essay he wrote titled "We Teach Who We Are".

"We need to open a new frontier in our exploration of good teaching: the inner landscape of a teacher’s life. To chart that landscape fully, three important paths must be taken—intellectual, emotional, and spiritual—and none can be ignored. Reduce teaching to intellect and it becomes a cold abstraction; reduce it to emotions and it becomes narcissistic; reduce it to the spiritual and it loses its anchor to the world. Intellect, emotion, and spirit depend on each other for wholeness. They are interwoven in the human self and in education at its best, and we need to interweave them in our pedagogical discourse as well." -Parker Palmer

I have come a long way since the last time I taught full time.  That was ten years ago!  At that time I had a one year old, was pregnant with my second, and barely knew who I was as an artist.  Today my children are 12 and 10, I have my MFA,  and have a confident 'voice' within my studio work.  I know my teaching will be better having these life experiences under my belt along with an entirely different understanding of what it means to be an artist.

Sometimes I don't know what I am thinking until I write these very words to you.  This has all been spinning around in my head this week so I am glad to make some sense of it.

Anyway.....I have really gone off the rails with this post....

My intention when I started writing is to update you on my progress with Vision 117.  So the picture above is something my Dad picked up at a garage sale.  It is the mold for making watch parts.  I have this vision of sewing it to the bottom of the paper and then drawing the hollyhock flowers sprouting from them.  I am trying to decide on the paper to use- Bristol paper or this map. The Bristol offers some thickness the map doesn't, which would hold this metal piece more securely, so I suppose I am leaning in that direction.

I then started some initial sketches from your photographs.  Not sure if I will add color to this one.  I will probably keep it a graphite drawing similar to ReVision 116.

Well, I need to get back to the studio now.  Talk with you on Tuesday!