For an artist, I’m pretty average. There has never been a moment in my life where someone told me, “Hey! You’re gifted and talented like [enter name of any famous artist]”, and I am okay with that. I worked hard to get to where I am and that is something I am very proud of. My development into an artist was a collaboration of encouragement from my parents, instruction from teachers, and experimentation and play by my own selfmotivation. In the 1990’s, the internet wasn’t on your phone and we couldn’t binge watch all the episodes of a series on Netflix. So, we played outside. My parents always encouraged us to build and dig and create something out of not much more than mud and sticks. Sure we had toys, too. I believe my environment was highly creative because of my play. I also would read a great deal. My imagination grew and so did my world. I had dreams of traveling to far off worlds and encountering creatures that I had never seen before, or admiring buildings build long ago. Looking back, I think my mother would agree with Piaget. In Feldman’s (1987) article “Developmental Psychology and Art Education: Two Fields at the Crossroads”, he says, “For Piaget action is essential to development: Acting on the world is the key process for understanding it” (p. 245). She took action to help with our development. We did hands-on activities, outings to the library for Story Time, road trips to see historical
sites and national parks, and lots of trips to museums. Because of this, I believe the foundation of my artistic development was shaped by my parents and took place while I was still a toddler until my middle school years. Elementary school provided very little artistic experiences, but middle school opened my eyes to new and exciting projects. I had new opportunities to play with media I had never used. Clay was a very exciting, but frustrating experience for me in 7th Grade. My project never worked the way I wanted it to and as a result I did very little with sculpture until college. Ms. Holtzheimer was my 7th grade Art Teacher and she gave her class a taste of a wide variety of art media. One week, she gave us a tour of the school dark room and explained a little about film and photography. Film photography was a whole new world and I joined the Photography Club the next year in 8th Grade. Photography became a fun interest and I enjoyed learning more about it. I had no idea that my excitement over one art form would turn into something that I greatly enjoyed and then, in college, morph into a passion. High school was, well, high school. There was drama, crushes, a driver’s license, first car accident, Mr. Sidor’s Art class, and a camera that joined me through my adolescent journey. To start out with I had a $10 film point-and-shoot camera. I took photos around town, like Figure 1, in attempts to capture my
punk rock teenage angst. I knew very little about photography rules, guidelines, mechanics, or anything, really. I got a job and saved my hard-earned dollars for my first Canon SLR, a Rebel Ti. I read the operating manual from front to back on several occasions to understand how to use the camera. Shortly before I bought my camera my dad had bought a Canon film SLR, so he helped me to understand some of the controls. I used mostly automatic settings and never ventured into Manual mode. High school is when an interest in photography became a true hobby. Mr. Sidor’s classroom is where I learned artistic basics like composition, emphasis,
color, and, more importantly, confidence. My high school art teacher encouraged us to continually make art. If you were finished with your assignment, you worked on a project that didn’t pertain to any graded assignment. There were lots of experiments and play in his classroom. Mr. Sidor’s style of teaching coincides with Universal Development. As Feldman (1987) describes, “…in universal domains, the movement is crucially the result of spontaneous tendencies of the child to learn about the world…” (p. 248). I remember him encouraging us to play and make mistakes. “In play, novelty and unpredictability are actively sought, whereas in real life we do not usually like uncertainty” (Dissanayake, 2003, p. 17). I was typically
Figure 1: Taken in 2003 at 15 years of age, I wanted to capture the place I spent so much of my time, Galaxy Games Arcade. My friend Rachel posed by the Mountain Dew sign because we really liked to drink Mountain Dew. This was a frame on one of my Hirst rolls of black and white Hilm from high school.
uncomfortable with the possibility of making a mistake. Mr. Sidor kept pointing out the strong areas of my work and giving me help and theories on how to improve my work. There were times where he didn’t point the answer out, but instead just told me to look at it tomorrow. Taking time away from a piece of artwork helped me see it differently. I have tried to keep in touch with my Mr. Sidor. He is currently teaching Art at Paris Gibson Alternative High School, where he gets the opportunity to help guide and teach students who struggled in the traditional high school. He was like a real-life Miss Frizzle, “Take chances, make mistakes, get messy” (Forte, 1994). He never gave up on any student and I’m so thankful he never gave up on me.
College was a chance to make new memories, make new friends, and make new things. I began at a community college and photography wasn’t a course that was available. I took whatever art class I could take and my artistic compositions improved. Some of my artwork was pretty decent. I transferred to a four-year university to pursue a degree in art. The University of Great Falls provided me with opportunities to take courses in photography, painting, printmaking, ceramics, soft pastels, and life drawing. I took every photography course available and learned how to process my own film and print my images in the dark room. Figure 2 is an example of my photography during this time. Most of my time was spent
Figure 2: Taken 2009 at the beginning of my Hirst photography class at the University of Great Falls. In our second assignment we learned how to create a silhouette. This was a happy accident and ended up being in my Hinal portfolio for that introductory course.
in the dark room. Hours of developing with fellow classmates gave me opportunities to bounce ideas off other people and have informal critiques with artists who were more naturally talented than myself. My biggest struggle in college was that I wasn’t as naturally talented and so I had to work very hard to get to the level as many of my peers. My upper level photography courses proved
that hard work pushed me ahead of those that were more talented. My other courses were a more of a challenge because of my struggle. Instead of college being a chance to make new things, it became a place where I was put to the test. Every student is at a different stage of artistic development; that was a lesson that I learned
Figure 3: Finger painting of one of my Hilm cameras from 2010.
long before I became a teacher. I had many frustrating days in the studio because of comparisons being made by one professor of my artwork and that of more talented artists. The confidence that Mr. Sidor built up within me was being slowly torn down. I was less likely to take chances in my drawing and painting. My photography was the only art form that I knew I could excel at consistently. Even now, I struggle to experiment in any art form because my mistakes were constantly
pointed out and rarely did I get feedback on how to remedy an error. Now, I realize that my professor had the mindset of individual selfhood as explained by Gablik (1992) in her article “Connective Aesthetics”: We live so much in an ethos of competitiveness, which keeps us bound to individualistic modes of thought and directed toward the making of products, that most of us in the capitalist world have never had an experience of true community. (Gablik, 1992, p. 2)
Figure 4: Color Hilm photo taken with a Holga plastic camera in 2013. I am learning to accept the mistakes and try to turn them into something beautiful.
I’m sure the experience made my skin tougher, but it made art not fun for two years. I did have some successful times in my painting class and ended up experimenting with finger painting as a result of a different professor’s encouragement. Figure 3 is my favorite finger painting from college. I still struggle with my confidence as an artist and photographer, but I have been able to break out and play with my film and digital photography. I have gained so much from my parents, teachers, and professors. My artistic development has been a long road with lots of bumps and a few bruises. I am proud of where I am because it is so far from where I began. Figure 4 is a more recent experiment with film. I’ve been inspired by the lomography movement and it makes me excited to see what I can do with film when I set my rulebook on the shelf. Struggles are how we grow. A butterfly has to work its way out of a cocoon, but once it has emerged it shows the world it’s beautiful wings. Hard work can be worth so much more than lazy talent. As I conclude this look at my development, I leave you with one last example of my work. I am a portrait photographer and love the challenge of capturing the personality of my clients (Figure 5). I have turned my struggle into a success, now I hope to help students work hard and succeed.
References Dissanayake, E. (2003). The core of art: Making special. Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies, 1(2), 13-38. Feldman, D. H. (1987). Developmental psychology and art education: Two fields at the crossroads. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 21(2), 243-259. Forte, D. (Producer). (1994). The Magic School Bus [Television series]. New York, NY: Scholastic Entertainment. Gablik, S. (1992). Connective aesthetics. American Art, 6(2). 2-7.
Figure 5: Senior portrait of Victoria taken in 2014. My digital photography has improved greatly since I converted. I still struggle with some concepts, but try to continue to learn as much as I can from resources and professionals around me.