When I was in elementary school I started drawing the Looney Tunes characters from a deck of cards. What I was really doing was copying one particular image of a character and duplicating it at the 9x12 size.  At the time I was overjoyed at the ability to copy it exactly, but to this day I am not a cartoonist.  I can’t make up my own characters or even draw the ones that already exist that well.  I spent years duplicating someone else’s art instead of trying to find my own “voice”.  Being good or bad at art has nothing to do with how proficient you are at the “7+7” as Gude puts it.   Replicating exactly what you see is a skill not everyone has to be sure but it is not always called for.  Impressionism, expressionism, and a half dozen other isms have proved that time and again.  Having something to say and finding a way to express it through the artistic process, in my mind, is the makings of an artist.  As an art teacher I may never know every way a project could be executed or which technology could be most helpful.  I am able to show the students new ways of thinking with the use of past and contemporary artist work, and by encouraging them to conceptualize rather than draw three different kinds of line and two different tones. 

Art:21 - William Kentridge: Anything is possible.   

Several weeks ago I was told I am a very process driven artist.  That was a revelation of sorts for me, and not because I had no idea, but that I had always known and never taken the time to be aware of it.  The finished product is never what I set out to create but what happens along the way while trying to make something else entirely.  This is why I am so drawn to Kentridge.  His work is so powerful and steeped with such meaning and emotion that the overall work is immensely powerful, but one single image out of the hundreds of thousands he uses is nothing to write home about.  His lines are not delicately place in the exact right place but quick fast slashes leaving each mark precisely where needed as only an experienced and gifted artist could.  And as soon as the image is recorded he takes it away and makes a new one in it’s place.  Often when students are in the early stages of their art careers every line is important, any quote/unquote wrong line is devastating.  I would like to give a class the assignment of a blank page.  Meaning that when they turn in the finial image there would be nothing but an empty page with only the remnants of erased lines and a handful of pictures.  I think this would get the students thinking about more than the end result.