From teaching to crafts

Creativity is a mental and social process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the creative mind between existing ideas or concepts, creativity is fueled by the process of either conscious or unconscious insight. An alternative conception of creativeness is that it is simply the act of making something new. From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creativity

In wrestling with notions of creativity and negative space, I think a lot about teaching. Sometimes, when I work with my students who are planning to become teachers, we have lively discussions about the metaphors they would use to describe their students and classrooms. It surprises me how often the notion of clay arises. They often describe their future (and in some cases current) students as unmolded clay and say it’s the teacher’s job to shape them. Personally, I hate that metaphor. I don’t believe our students are simply waiting for us. Like their teachers, students struggle to perceive outlines and attempt to create their own metaphors for creating and communicating with the world around them. As teachers, I believe it is our task to interact with them and assist them in creating the language they need to do that. The best teachers (and I refer now to teachers of any level, in any capacity) continue to struggle, seeking new ways of seeing the student, the subject, and ways of presenting it. Sometimes we—and the student—succeed, sometimes not.

The creation of something new, then, does not refer to the student as that which is created. For me, it refers to the creation of a new way of engaging with the world. New associations, new metaphors. (I’m still trying to decide what metaphors I would use to describe my own students.) The incredible aha! moment of teaching occurs when a student succeeds in finding that new way to engage--when she suddenly sees something that she never saw before, or sees something new in what was there all along. It's the moment when a single line in a poem transforms one's understanding of a memory, or when a few chords of music suddenly awaken dormant emotions.

I think about the connections between my career in teaching and my recent forays into crafting and art. I think they are connected, and I think they complement each other. My whole career is based on language—the study of words, the creation of words, the use of words. In working on the teaching part of my life, perhaps I started to lose touch with my own attempts to make new associations and now turn to connecting the physical nature of using my hands to create what I don’t have words to say and don’t need words to produce. I love being in my garage for hours on end, wearing my grungy paint-covered clothes and turning totally inward.

Last spring I sold a painting (my first ever sale!) to someone I didn't know well who said she saw in the painting images of her own childhood and past, things that she wrestled with as an adult. The thought that those hours of turning inward allowed me to find a language that a virtual stranger needed for herself--what I felt at the moment she told me that is what I feel when I know that a student and I have found our connection.

Negative Space

Negative space: empty space in an artwork, a void. To some people, this term suggests unpleasant things. Sometimes when we say "negative" we mean "bad." Both "space" and "emptiness" suggest a lack, a shortage of something. This is unfortunate... (www.masterpieceart.org/Dictionary%20of%20Terms.htm)

Negative space as a concept in teaching is one that I cannot get out of my head. In a discussion about Pearlstein's paintings last year, I heard someone refer to the human figures in his work as the negative space. I have been thinking about the notion of negative space and what it might add to how I think about teaching--an activity that, I am beginning to believe, focuses fundamentally on potential and the unseen. In that discussion of Pearlstein's paintings, I felt for just a moment that I suddenly saw things--my teaching, my long-ago creative writing, my recent attempts at visual work-- in a different way. My education and interests have until only recently always focused on the written word, not on visual representations of the world. This blog, is, I suppose, an attempt at bringing together the visual and the written, and to do so in a way that explores negative space in both.

As a professor in the humanities, my adult life has focused on creating metaphors to communicate with and about the world around me. In exploring the language of the visual arts, I have found a new vocabulary to talk about this. I hope to continue to do this in far more detail than I have in this post and to have conversations here about this with you.