Through teaching I share the enthusiasm I have for my discipline.
It is a practice of presenting relevant information in an accessible
and clear manner while taking into account the student's level
of emotional, technical, and intellectual development. Talent is
a term to which I am ambivalent. I believe that desire, commitment,
and perseverance are more important. As an educator I try to
instigate those qualities in a student. While beginners learn best
through structured exercises, I try to avoid dogmatic approaches
to teaching. Teaching art is more than training on techniques;
it is about helping individuals develop an authentic relationship
with art, a personal relationship that incorporates an awareness
of contemporary, cultural, and historical contexts. My teaching
philosophy is to balance structure with freedom of expression
and to encourage an evolution towards more conceptual
and technical concerns.

My philosophy of teaching is to engender questions about the
relationship between form, expression and innovation. My teaching
is informed by the dialectic between content and style and
presents art history as evidence of concepts and social strategies.
My responsibility is to offer alternative possibilities in the expression
of an idea and further information on techniques, to show the
student the importance of understanding the abstract/formal
language of art and procedures for developing representational
skills. I try to coax the best work from my students by engaging
them with their sense of wonder. Inspiration and authenticity are
marvelous conditions when tempered with aesthetic perspective
and discipline.

My teaching can be characterized as process oriented,
conceptually driven, and information intensive. I have developed
classroom projects that elicit responses to aesthetic and design
issues. In the classroom, I like to push the limits of what can be
achieved through an exercise. To teach is to guide and stimulate
a synthetic perception that allows a student to see his or her artistic
development as a natural process. As a teacher, I work to increase
awareness of the synesthetic nature of concepts of beauty and in
the design principles of form and language. To teach is to educate
on the fundamental nature of culture as an expression of human
involvement with the physical, social, or spiritual nature of
our environment.