A Little More About Me

I have said quite a bit about my life as an artist. My personal life is filled with a lot of joy. I am married and have two wonderful kids. I recently celebrated my 12th wedding anniversary to my with Kate, who I have known since middle school. Over this past weekend my youngest, Madeline celebrated her 4th birthday, It was quite the party. I'm still picking up half finished juice boxes that were scattered across the yard. My son Aidan is seven and is all boy. His favorite pastime is gettin' down and dirty with some Lightsabers and having a good ol' fashioned Jedi Battle. They both attend Montessori of the Rio Grande Charter School.

My early teaching career was at the university level. I taught design foundations, sculpture and lithography. When my wife got pregnant with our son we moved home to New Mexico to start our family. Teaching jobs at the University were scarce, so I made the decision to go to work as a welder. It wasn't long before I went into business for myself. I was the owner and operator of a fairly successful architectural metal fabrication company that did custom metal work for commercial and residential construction for about 6 years until I came to the realization that I wasn't happy doing what I was doing. I missed making art and most of all I missed teaching. When my wife finished Law School, we decided it was my turn to go back to school, I wanted to teach young people, so I made the decision to come into the Art Education program and work towards a K-12 License.

It is a pleasure to be in this class. I am getting more out of this online course than I ever thought I would. As an art teacher it is a challenge and a necessity to incorporate reading and writing. When I was teaching at the college level, I would conceive of the basic elements and principals taught in the Art Studio classes as being analogous to grammar and punctuation rules for a students of rhetoric and composition. One must first understand the elements of a sentence in order to construct a well-crafted statement before the medium can be appropriated and the sentence's structure subverted to create a new language in which to communicate. For the purpose of visual arts education, students need to understand the various formal elements that cohere in a work of art, as well as how the conceptual content proceeds from its composition. With that being said, as go through my graduate program I am also seeing the need to bridge those ideas of teaching art with use reflective writing to engage students in their learning and understanding of what art is and can be.

My next blog post will focus on the book I chose "Reading Don't Fix No Chevys"- Reading in the Lives of Young Men by Michael Smith and Jeffery Wilhelm. Due to an ordering SNAFU with Amazon.com I am hoping to get the book today. I originally placed my order on the 15th of June and received my order last Thursday, but when I opened my package, the wrong book was sent. Very frustrating and for me a needed exercise in patience. My hope is the right book will show up this afternoon and I will begin making post that relate to my reading beginning tomorrow. Till then, I'm signing off.