Artist Statement
As an artist, I have always been prone to artistic tendency since a very young age. I
have notebooks, on sketchbooks, on doodles, of drawings and ideas that I have done
since I was about two years old. My personal art style focuses a lot on a stylistic realism, with paintings that are more gestural then precise. From high school onward into college I have been focusing a lot of my personal art practice on emotional tendencies of human beings, particularly to do with my own depression. Recently, I have been more focused on talking about dissociation disorder in my pieces, which is a disorder that I recently found out I suffer from. My art practice mostly consists of paintings of the human face, mostly based on myself, with exaggerated expressions, but more recently I have been focusing on more sculptural and performance based artwork.
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Teaching Philosophy
My core focus on teaching students is to focus on fostering their creativity and designing curriculum based on the wants of the students. I hope to be a guide to better their inspiration by taking their ideas and fostering them into lesson plans that will help them grow as artists. By focusing on the students objectives, I will focus on being able to have the students take a way an overall love and appreciation for the work they have made, rather than having it be a class that they feel as though they are forced to take. By focusing on creativity based art education, the students will be taught subjects that eb and flow with the needs and ideals of the students in my class, having the curriculum not only focus on the criteria wanted by the school, but to focus on lesson plans that the students have a strong desire towards. A theme that runs deeply in my teaching style is the idea that the students are the most important part of teaching, and as such, the students should have a choice in what they would like to be learning. Even though, I would be sure to focus on the statewide curriculum that is required, I would plan my teaching curriculum based on the statewide wants, as well as using the students creativity. In twenty years, I hope these students will still have a love for art that they would have gained in my classroom, by being able to foster their own ideas to create unique pieces of art that are important to them.
My biggest influence to teach art was my mother. Growing up, my household was centered around creativity and art because my mother was always painting or doing some sort of art. Whether it be painting a wall in the house, or painting a watercolor landscape, my house always had a focus on artistic qualities. I decided to become an art teacher, rather than a studio artist because it was my dream to help shape the minds of our growing youth, and having a creative outlet in which the students felt like they could escape from their lives and have a safe learning environment to express their creativity.