| TEACHING PHILOSOPHY My approach to teaching is guided by two convictions: that each student possesses creative potential for expressing themselves through art, and that art should be more concerned with life than with art. Students can best realize their potential as artists, in whatever media or style, when they see art not exclusively as a collection of techniques, but as a mode of having and thinking about experience. Some experiences are specific to the process of working with a particular artistic media; I believe that painting and drawing should be tactile, and I encourage students to take pleasure in the difficult process of mastering realistic drawing. As a teacher, I like to begin with realism, since it is through realism that students learn to look at the material world profoundly and critically. As the students gain confidence in their creativity, they learn new modes of thinking that will help them as artists and as people. Practically speaking, I organize my drawing and painting classes so that after my students have acquired enough of a technical groundwork, they can work with either representational or more abstract modes of creation. I have worked with Edward�s Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, which helps to instill confidence. Nicolaides� The Natural Way to Draw has been a useful teaching text for me; while it is informal, it helps to develop fundamentals and to encourage students to think of looking at objects as a total experience involving all their senses. In addition, two books by Ralph Mayer have been important to me in my development as a teacher and as an artist: The Painter�s Craft and The Artist�s Handbook of Materials & Techniques. Both introduce a wide variety of media and techniques, enabling interesting avenues for artistic experimentation. I have developed a repertory of classroom exercises to help students build their expressive powers. For example, I ask my painting classes to look at a landscape and then come in and paint it from memory. I also give them studies in narrative painting: I ask them to write stories, exchange them, and then paint each other�s stories. Over the course of the term, I have them work more and more with abstraction and with the intrinsic qualities of the media. One particularly useful exercise is to have students put a layer of paint down on the surface of a canvas, and then use different layers of color and a variety of tools (such as palette knives and brushes) over the course of several days to pull out of the canvas non-representational shapes, lines, and masses. At the advanced level, I give students more freedom to pursue individual directions as they discover more and more their own aesthetic sensibilities. On the graduate level I guide students to discover their own vision by evaluating historical and contemporary influences through reading, discussion, critical analysis, and experimentation. I recognize that not all of my students will become formal, practicing artists. Through the practice of art, however, I hope to help my students to be more sensitive and more aware of the world they live in. Eugenia Pardue |
 |
 |
 |