On this rainy Saturday in The Bronx, I’ve decided to revive the good old college blog. I hope to use this as some sort of documentation for my process and progress with my art and teaching.
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately reflecting on my artistic practices, and thinking about how far I’ve come since college. After I graduated I moved to New York to be a Catholic missionary, First grade Teacher, and Art Teacher. I quickly found myself swamped, and didn’t prioritize any art making my first year here. My second year, I transitioned into a regular full time Art Teacher, and quickly developed a better understanding of how to manage my time, and prioritize creating as a necessary output in my life. I dove back into clay, and developed a renewed interest in printmaking, primarily linocut.
During my second year teaching, I was so happy to be out of a homeroom class and back home in my own art class. I spent a lot of time reminiscing on how it felt to be a student in art class growing up, and applied a lot of those feelings to my own practices. My first year as an Art Teacher was hard, but I grew so much, and made a lot of lasting relationships with students, parents, and coworkers. I spent a lot of time and effort into making my classroom feel like a safe space where students could express themselves creatively and emotionally, even if that meant expressing myself emotionally to them, as well.
I’ve now nearly completed my third year teaching, my third year of living in New York, and I’m so excited for what’s to come.
I’m currently working on a painting series exploring the spaces where I spend most of my time, my local cafe, my favorite subway, my classroom, my fire escape. I’ve pushed myself down an exciting path with these POV paintings, and I love that I’ve been able to create a world where the viewer has stepped foot into my reality.
These paintings feature a distinct lack of people. In a city that is teeming with life around every corner, we all find our safe spaces, our places where we feel most at home, the locations where we can find refuge and contemplate.
While creating these paintings, I’ve been using a Burnt umber wash for an underpainting, something I’ve never done for an acrylic painting. Though acrylic behaves quite different than oil, and the values rarely show up though the opaque and vibrant acrylic colors, it has done wonders simply to help me block in the painting, and understand the space better. Though these are places that I have spent significant amounts of time, it is sometimes difficult to step into it from an artistic perspective, with an understanding of how to replicate the space. While establishing tonal values is helping finalize the forms and locations of objects, it is also giving me time to process and gain a deeper understanding of the space, something that becomes almost meditative. From studying the minuscule curvature of a subway bench, replicating the font on signage, or painting each and every table at the cafe where I’ve spent so much time people watching.
I’m excited to see where I go with my work in the future, but I have a feeling that the best is yet to come.
clay ain't dirt 