Looking Forward in Art

I have never thought of becoming or being anything or anyone extraordinary. I have always thought of my future in a pretty realistic fashion, simply because I believe I have been content all of my life to work toward taking just one step more than I have already walked.

As an art teacher, I hope to change the typified personality of the American art teacher. The arts in the United States is dwindling due to lack of funding, which leads to lack of interest, which ultimately leads to lack of having art and music in schools. To generate interest, I would alter the kind of material taught. I personally grew up with art classes that included gluing together construction paper, cotton balls, painting with watercolors, and later in high school, some pottery and drawing. It was hard to find our school the money that our teacher needed to do new projects; by my senior year, only three students were in art classes.

It is my opinion that if taught with variety, open-mindedness, and encouragement, all children can excel in the average art class. Children are often not taught to look at the things around them to use as examples, but rather to bring from their mind crude renditions of stick figures and see-through cats, straight-as-a-ruler trees and sheep-fleece clouds. They paint only blue skies and only green grass, only brown dogs and only peach people…this is not true to the real world. Children need to see and experiment, play and experience in order to learn how to create art with their own two hands.

Children need to learn how to use the computer to draw, how to landscape flowers and trees, how to make maps, how to make movies, how to take pictures, how to put on makeup, how to be actors and actresses upon a stage. While they have their use, construction paper and watercolors are not all they’re cracked up to be.

I hope to also teach my students about art history at a younger age. Children at younger ages should be able to connect with abstract artwork to understand that art is not a perfect and exact thing. In this understanding, they can create their own art without feeling downcast that their images look unrealistic or incorrect.

Finally, I hope to challenge previously conceived ideas about the art department. I want to encourage students to do their best and to work to improve their art. It is my belief that art is not inborn in any person, but grown in each of us from the moment we pick up a pencil. Just as flowers start as a seed, all talents and skills must have a hole dug, roots grown, and then and only then can the flower begin to bud and blossom.