(light music) - I think no matter what your discipline is or what you teach, as an educator, you have to educate yourself in order to share.

And over the course of my career, I learned to appreciate so many other artists, so many other movements.

I would never have anticipated how much I would benefit from teaching in that way.

Well, excuse the mess.

I'm in the middle of getting ready for three art festivals, reviewing inventory, making labels, price lists, deciding what will go to the show and what will not.

The body of work I'm preparing to feature is my Happily Ever After series.

And then in these boxes I've got, I don't know, somewhere between 30, 35 drawings framed and ready to go.

Getting organized.

It doesn't look like it, but it's getting organized.

I use the metaphor of setting ships to sail as students of mine have graduated and moved on into art related careers or as visual artists.

It's very gratifying.

When Laura Shum graduated, she and her parents gave me a letter she wrote when she was in third or fourth grade and she knew she was gonna be an artist and this was her gift to me when she graduated.

My best subject, my best subject is art.

I like drawing.

You asked me did I ever feel inspired by my students and I turned it around a bit and I said when my students started doing extraordinary work, I would feel them nipping at my heels and that would motivate me to get back into the studio.

I'm gonna do a little bit more right through here.

I want this to be brighter.

I want this to model more gently and I'll refine the hands but this is the palette that I'm using right now.

And when I say a cool highlight, I'm gonna go to the Titian Green, probably a little bit of Sienna or Rose and the white, and that's going to give me the cool highlight that I want up here.

Some of it is already in the face and I've got to judiciously choose how to use it and be sure that I model it well.

You know, it's like, I guess the gas tank in your car and I did an enormous amount of creative problem solving with my students, all day long, situations I could never anticipate, you know, it'd be on the fly, solving a design problem or materials problem all day long.

But I thrived on it.

I was trying to figure out what worked the best.

So you probably recognize a lot of the color that is in that big painting.

(upbeat music) Being included, curated into this show by Gail Paul is definitely a milestone in my career.

Wonderful.

Thank you.

Being in the company of nationally recognized artists is significant to me.

It's not something I take lightly, and I'm very humbled.

The concept for the painting comes from my visits to the retention pond at the corner of High Street and Cedar Lane.

I was first attracted to that retention pond because of how beautiful it was on that October afternoon.

Thunderstorms were rolling in and I pulled my car over, parked, got my camera out and just watched the wind activate the surface of the water and dried lily pads.

I knew what I wanted to do and I had to psych myself up, almost like that theme music in the tornado scene when the witch is on her bike in the tornado, duh, duh, duh, duh, duh.

So I'm getting psyched up because I want to use really aggressive marks, especially in the sky and in the clouds and have that energy, that movement translate onto the canvas.

(upbeat music) I was following the pond through the seasons of the year, the changes the pond went through and I became acutely aware that the lily pads, the lotus pods, the seeds, the flowers, that it was all metaphor for our own journeys in life.

The things that we experienced that maybe are more difficult, and then holding on to the idea that things are going to get better.

You know, there's a promise in the seeds in that lotus pod and the promise is, and they will go down into that mud and find their way up again and bloom.

When I have any kind of struggle, I think about the power of regeneration, the regeneration that seeds can create.

Have made a few personal contracts with different things that I've planted.

That's kind of the underlying metaphor with the Pond series, but it's also finding beauty in something that is not necessarily beautiful.

(upbeat music)