I teach a painting and drawing class as part of the Community Education program at College of Marin. Yesterday when talking with a friend who is also a student, I became aware of some more of my prejudices as a teacher. The particular prejudice came about when thinking about some of my students who have technical skills but who rest on their skills instead of pushing themselves beyond their comfort zone, and who also resist being guided or pushed by me as their teacher. It’s a dilemma that I have talked about with a fellow teacher, Marianna Goodheart. Marianna has been teaching for 25 years or so as a Community Ed. teacher. Her strategy is to expose her students to contemporary work as a means of showing her students how a subject or idea can be explored in ways that the student is unfamiliar with and/or a little uncomfortable with. If she has a student who paints animals in a traditional hallmark way, she’ll show them work of Roy de Forest or Susan Rothenberg or someone like that. I have done the same with some of my students that I consider caught in their admiration of their technique but whose content is bland or boring. Marianna tells me that over time students who stick with your class can overcome their pride of skill and allow themselves to take risks, but that there are some who won’t ever go beyond their technique. Some of those students, the ones who don’t go beyond their technique sell their work, and so because there is a market for their work, the concept of pushing their work down a less predicable path isn’t necessarily enticing. Their own teacher may sell less than they do, so the student, quite logically will ask themselves “why would I want to take a path different than the one I’m on?”
All of us establish a style at some point. But at what point does the style become a rut, a reliance on working in a way that is a predictable form of problem solving? I’ve developed a style, a look, and its garnering attention in the form of shows and sales. I like that I am getting this attention-it is after all a byproduct of being a professional, of the painting process, is it not? Still I question whether getting success is stymieing delving into ways of painting or blocking me from exploring other avenues. I can’t say that I have come to a resolution about this either and just wonder if this form of thinking is peculiar to those of my particular psychological make-up, one that questions everything, including success.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 27th, 2009 at 1:05 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.