carol j watson

This article will make its official debut in the March 2010 of Austin Family Magazine and website. Be sure to pick up a copy at a location near you!

When people find out that I am an art teacher, certain responses are predictable: “Oh, I’m not good at art,” or “I can’t draw,” or “Be glad I’m not in your art class!” These comments are unfortunately common, and depending on the situation, I debate internally whether to simply accept their statement as fact, politely encourage them with an optimistic remark, or engage in a conversation about their experiences with art. Regardless of my decision, one thing routinely, painfully, becomes clear: Little I say will sway them from their negative opinion of themselves as artists.

Simultaneously, these self-proclaimed non-artists often wax poetic about their desire to be artistic, yearning for that nebulous Art Talent which they themselves never attained. I wonder at what point these people lost sight of their artful lives. Ironically, these folks also speak of few or sporadic art classes and experiences growing up. Or, they refer to art experiences limited to “coloring inside the lines” at the behest of their well-meaning homeroom teacher. In the absence of rigorous and dedicated art education, their idea of art and what art is grew stunted and uninformed.

On the other hand, individuals who actually had art class in school on a regular basis confide in me that they view their artistic ability as average or above. Furthermore, if they connected even only a little with their art teacher, they were deeply and positively impacted in a constructive and permanent way. Art is seen as something more than the ability to draw; art is a lens with which they view life. Over and over I hear from people I meet, see from students I teach, that art is the glue that connects the many different parts of their lives. Artful or creative thinking adds interest and innovation in an otherwise dull day at the office. Some days I am certain that it is my art class that made a particular student rise out of bed and come to school.

There is something special about arts education during the formative years of youth. More than just an “extra” in a child’s day, art is an essential component in developing a child’s ability to see the world around her in a critical, qualitative, and affective way. More than just learning how to draw, art education teaches a child to see, to perceive, and to represent her environment, ideas, and responses in a variety of ways. More than just creating a sculpture or painting, art education compels a child to be in touch with her emotional and intellectual motivation for making certain aesthetic choices. The young artist must articulate what is often more easily represented with images, colors, textures, or form.

Furthermore, research continues to show us that students receiving a fine arts education perform higher on standardized tests such as the SAT, enter the working world better equipped to meet the demands of 21st century employers, and support the arts as an economic force in their communities. CreateTexas (www.createtexas.org) lists no fewer than 20 reasons as to why Texas’ economy depends on the arts and the creative sector. The Texas Commission on the Arts (www.arts.state.tx.us) provides data on the future of arts education (visual arts and performing arts) as seen through the eyes of CEOs and other business leaders. Repeatedly we are being forewarned that creative thinking, innovation, and communication are qualities needed for the 21st century workforce, and that exposure and interaction with the arts is one of the main components of a 21st century education.

The Texas Art Education Association features on its website (www.taea.org) compelling work by Elliott Eisner entitled “Ten Lessons the Arts Teach.” It is on display in my art room, shared by my peers in art and art education, read to my students and shared with parents, and is an invaluable reminder of why art education and Youth Art Month are critical components in the whole education of any child. For the parent, grandparent, educator, or advocate, it is invaluable articulation of why art education is important in our schools. Eisner’s list empowers those who wish to seek, protect, and demand more art instruction in schools and communities.

TAEA also promotes March as Youth Art Month on its website, and provides resources for teachers and parents interesting further promoting art education year round. Students from around the state of Texas have an opportunity to create flags promoting Youth Art Month. Winners are featured on the website. The theme for Youth Art Month for 2010-2014 is “Art Shapes the World.”

The Council for Art Education (http://www.acminet.org/cfae.htm), the official sponsor of Youth Art Month, highlights many of the benefits of art education and quality art programs in schools. Enhanced self esteem, creative problem solving, and appreciation of others are cited as some of the many benefits of art education. Youth Art Month, observed yearly in March, is a time for appreciation of art and art programs locally, regionally, and nationally. Anyone can contribute to the month’s events, and your local art teacher is a great place to start when seeking art appreciation opportunities. Through consistent and dedicated support of art education, parents, grandparents, teachers, and schools can make a positive difference in the artful lives that children lead.

I know that even as an impassioned art teacher, there is little I can do to change a person’s experience with art in the past. Regardless of where a person might fall on the creative curve, there is one thing that anyone can do: Ensure that every child’s educational future consists of rigorous, extensive, and protected arts education.

Whew, what a school year it has been! Better than ever, busier than ever, with more talented students, more challenges in every way and every day. For months now we’ve been preparing for our big dance, V.A.S.E. (Visual Art Scholastic Event, see www.taea.org), on February 27th. I get to take 25 of my best, brightest, and -ahem- most academically eligible art students to this competition held again at San Marcos High School in San Marcos, Texas. This year, they’ve worked on self portraits, still life drawings, and gesture drawings, and now it is coming down to the wire. Less than two weeks away, we’re staying after school late and coming in to class early, putting the finishing touches on the work destined for judges’ hands.

The best part is by far the look of achievement on students’ faces when they hand me a finished work and we get to mat it for competition. Not normally driven by competition, this event moves me. I love the challenge my students face: conceiving a project idea, seeing it through to the end in whatever form it winds up taking, thinking deeply as they create, connecting their ideas to elements and principles of art, facing a judge, and lastly, coming away with feedback, experience, and a better understanding of themselves as artists.

I’ll post more about this experience as it unfolds. But for now, I am busy cutting mats, spraying fixative, and reassuring nervous students…and myself.

Sigh…

The end of summer break is drawing near, and I find myself at the zenith of my creative energy. June was for decompressing, exercising, and sleeping. July was all about business: Dental appointments, doctor appointments, various household administrative tasks that had been held til summer break. Around the middle of July, the electric buzz in my head meant ideas were finally heating up and bouncing around in my brain, and my “work” began. By August 1st, I was in the throes of jewelry making, photography, listing new items on Etsy, and planning my next moves. Art shows to enter, new beads to make on the torch, and suddenly, I realized that school is less than two weeks away…

Sigh.

You might think that I am not looking forward to school. Not true. I love teaching art, and I love what I do for ten months out of the year. It’s just that the next two weeks are in many ways the hardest part of the year, and require a shift in thinking for me. A shift that takes me away from my much awaited regenerative, creative time back to lesson planning, meetings, parents, anxious teenagers trying so hard not to look like anxious teenagers, more meetings, more lesson plans, new schedule, new problems to solve, and the like…The Friday before teachers return to work is always the hardest. Four projects to wrap up this weekend. Somehow get to sleep Sunday night. Show up Monday morning, with a smile on my face, ready to begin a school year anew.

Every year this happens. I press the “pause” button on my tidal wave of creative energy. Then I spend two hard weeks preparing for the real work of the school year to begin. And, as always, when I press that “pause” button a second time to unleash the creative thinking again, I realize that I have a better use for that creative energy than just me.

Here’s to a new school year.

As a part of my professional development, I am taking a course in Digital Citizenship through my school district. Very informative. Very cool. Very much a prerequisite before they let you take even more informative and even cooler technology courses. I’m really looking forward to some exciting high tech connections in my teaching this coming school year.

One of the requirements for completion of the course is a journaling. I’d like to share an excerpt from my journal with you now:

“In closing, I am glad to be a part of the generation that might not have always lived with high tech goodness, but was of age and open to it as it came around. I turned 40 this year, and I remember -and lived- taking programming in the 7th grade, also while learning how to use a word processing electronic typewriter. I remember -and lived- the morphing of the telephone from the big black one in the hallway or kitchen to the tiny one in my back pocket that does WAY more than just send my voice across the air. Remember how cool and new pagers were? Remember when a fax was solely a separate piece of clunky machinery? While my son and my students have never known anything different from the high tech world in which we live, and because of that they think they’re all that and a bag of chips, I LIVED through the advent of this high tech world. Its history is a part of me, and it gives me context, it gives me appreciation for what is happening and what is to come. And that’s pretty cool…”

Something to think about…

Spring is definitely here. My favorite color, the tender green of springtime, is everywhere. My Jeep matches Mother Nature, and I love it! Blessed with beautiful Spring Break weather, my family has taken full advantage of it: washing the Jeep, taking the top down, working in the garden, putting up the long-awaited purple screen door (more on that later), painting, sweeping, napping with the windows open, and watching our precious cats mesmerized by birds and bees they see through the latched screen door.

For Spring Break 2009, I had grand illusions of days and days of uninterrupted art, though. I have beads to create, jewelry pieces to design, and a canvas just screaming at me from its lonely easel post in the kitchen. So what happened to my creative energy? That’s simple. I diverted it to creative tasks (blessings?) around the house.

As we hung the screen door, as I painted the window in my master bath, as I spray-painted an antique chair and created a new and purple-y focal area by my front door, I thought a lot about creative energy. About creating art. About what art is and what it isn’t. I concluded that the creative and artistic energy that flows from us isn’t confined to being appreciated in a drawing or bead or sculpture. It’s the artful life we lead; it is the artful approach we take to creating the world in which we live. As I worked around the house, I used creative energy no differently than if I were working on the torch or at the easel. The main difference I see is that my accomplishments at home can’t be sold on Etsy or displayed in an exhibit somewhere. Not likely, anyway.

What this means to me is that whether we see ourselves as traditional artists or not, we all can lead our lives artfully. We can pour our creative energy into the world around us, our communities, our schools, our neighborhoods, and our homes. I’m pretty sure someone has already written this book, and yes, I know I’m stating the obvious, but it seems like something worth saying over and over again.

I wish you a creative Spring.

In addition to adoring the artistic creative process, I love the creative force behind gardening and the natural world. For most of 2008, I wasn’t able to do much gardening, at least not compared to previous years. However, our citrus trees (lime, lemon, orange) continue to be a source of delight and satisfaction. While we burned through our limes long ago, our lemons and oranges are just now blessing us.

I just had to take some pictures.

My husband, Arden, and I had an opportunity to attend a recent retreat for board members and volunteers of a wonderful and local non-profit organization called Georgetown Art Works. Our goals were simple: Clarify our vision as an organization, write (or at the very least agree upon the basics of) a mission statement, work on our 2009 calendar, and designate specific responsibilities and opportunities for each of us in attendance. We had an incredible facilitator, a dedicated board president, plenty of food, great ideas, and most importantly, a creative outlet. We made incredible progress.

The creative outlet, which was strictly optional, was to design a chair made from various materials: pipe cleaners, wire, beads, and imagination. As we listened, ate, talked, prioritized, laughed, and became better acquainted with one another, we also created a chair representative of us and our task at hand of “chairing” some event or task.

By the end of the retreat, several completed chairs were passed around for oohs and ahhhs…Oh, how I wished I had brought my camera! Each chair was indeed unique, representative of its creator, and just spilling over with artistic genius! The funniest, and certainly most endearing, moment was when my husband and I placed our chairs side by side. If you know us, you’ll love this picture (I snapped this picture at home):

While mine was, well, what you might expect from me, Arden’s was delightfully sturdy, stable, well-made…also what you would expect from him. I love the contrast the two chairs created, but it wasn’t until we showed the chairs to our son, Carter, when he commented on their scale. The way he put it was something like this, ” Whoever can fit into one chair can also fit into the other, isn’t that cool?” Pretty astute for a 13 year old, I think. What he hit upon is that our chairs shared the same scale. And in that moment I realized that our chairs were a perfect snapshot of our life together, me and Arden. Some similarities, some differences…well, maybe a lot of differences to those who only look at the outside, but we live our lives in scale with one another.

Perhaps that accounts for the harmony we so often experience in our household, even in these tumultuous times.

At any rate, this art activity ran deep and wide for me…I learned a lot that day of the retreat, but even more about myself, my love, and our life together later on.

Art is like that. It mirrors your reality, makes things clearer, gives voice to your life and times.

Art is worth doing.

I love working with blue/brown glass combinations. Doing so is the lampworking equivalent of jeans and a soft turtleneck sweater on a rainy day. There’s something so maternal and genuine in this combination, perhaps because they are the essence of earth and air, soil and sky. Visually, these beads are versatile in terms of fashion and jewelry design applications. This beadset features moretti glass of cobalt, blue, periwinkle, sky blue, blue aventurine, brown, topaz, taupe, and ivory. Transparent light blue and topaz lend three dimensionality to many of the beads, and a variety of shapes and designs are highlighted in this set.

This set features variations of brown, taupe, topaz, red, yellow, and ivory. I used both opaque and transparent glass, the latter of which creates the layered look in several of the beads. This was a new color combination for me, and I enjoyed working with it. Warm, organic, and honeyed, the end results are reminiscent of harvest time. Beyond that, the red glass brings out something primal and corporeal in the color combinations.

Blood and Honey.

For the last week or so, my life has been focused primarily on painkillers, sleep, and physical therapy. All good. All helpful. I’m glad my surgery was successful, and I am profoundly glad to be home. Thanksgiving dinner at the hospital did not suck, by the way. Quite tasty.

I know I’m feeling better in significant ways, because I’ve felt some creative stirrings today. Specifically, I woke from a nap with a slew of ideas, and as soon as I am done crowing about that fact I will be sketching and writing my nap ideas out.

To that point, I have gotten several really key inspirations after a good stretch of sleep. I know that when I am worried, sleep-deprived, or feeling down, my creativity takes a serious hit. Rest is good. My husband is the ultimate nap artist, and he will be so proud to read this admission: Naps are Good.

Speaking of naps, I shall now snuggle up with my sketchbook and attempt one more nap before dinner…