I truly didn’t know what to write about this week. I finished with Wellington Middle-High last week so I wasn’t teaching M/W and my T/Th practicum were lessons created and led by one of my co-teachers. I decided I would make this journal about the non-teaching part of my teaching philosophy which is that I will first and foremost label myself as an artist before an art teacher. I am an artist who also teaches, not a teacher whose subject is art. I was creating art for nearly a decade before I decided to be a teacher and I hope to make art long after I am done teaching.

Art has informed my life. It was how I built self-confidence and efficacy, it allows me an avenue to look back on my childhood and teen years that isn’t sad, it gives me hope for the future and allows me to communicate across planes that written and verbal communication wish they had access to. Art gives me a way to focus my curiosity and love for learning, a way to busy my hands and mind when I need to escape. I fell in love with it at an early age and I’m reminded of why every single day.

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So why this piece? Haven’t all the art journals included art?

Yes. But all the embroidery I stitched were just accessories to the narrative of the art journals. A way to visually provide context for what I wrote. This time it's flipped. The focus is the art and you must now read this for context.

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I am a painting specialty. I’m very good at it and get better every day. I love it but I chose it because I felt it was the most useful to keep up on my drawing and painting skills for teaching. My heart is in fibers. I took Fibers I last semester and I felt such a burst of joy and curiosity in the discovery of this brand-new medium that I haven’t felt in years. I deeply loved working on the loom. I was also nearly moved to tears in frustration because of the loom more than once but that is another reason why I liked it. I have been doing art for so long that everything is so predictable. Even new media isn’t really new because I have enough stored knowledge to figure it out quickly. The loom was not like that. I learned the hard way that all the counting and checking and double checking and triple checking and patterns and numbers and rules cannot be shortcut. They can’t be half listened to, and they definitely can’t be ignored. I was humbled by the loom and gained an incredible amount of respect and love because of it. So much so that two months after Fibers ended, I bought my own giant loom that I spent nearly all of spring break rearranging my room for it. I then immediately started a piece that is the one I cut from to stitch into the hoop for this week’s journal. Complete with the mistake in machine stitching that made me cut it off the big piece in the first place. It is still humbling me and I have much to learn. I can’t wait!