Marking the week

-
Mark-making tools

...so many amazing conversations this week...my head is spinning...

These pictures and essays and websites and code poems...all of it. Your work inspires me.

I am reading Maxine Greene and thinking about being an artist educator within the framework she illuminates.

We may have reached a moment in our history when teaching and learning, if they are to happen meaningfully, must happen on the verge. Confronting a void, confronting nothingness, we may be able to empower the young to create and re-create a common world—and, in cherishing it, in renewing, discover what it signifies to be free. (Dialectic of Freedom, p. 23)

The common space emerges from our conversation and I am transported to the edge of something I don't know how to describe. I'm on the verge. I am the young and your work is the teacher; in class and at the coffee shop I learn again and again that mark making matters (whether with a camera, a crayon, a line of text or a string of code on a computer), and that I am so lucky to be sharing this journey with you.

Thanks to everybody.

Mark-making tools
Pictures from the week at Teachers College, Columbia, in-between reading and writing and teaching and talking.

See also: Maxine Greene: The Importance of Personal Reflection and the Collection.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

-
Image
The process of bringing a project to completion is the hardest part. It's tough to let go. When I'm inside the work I feel alive, activated, engaged. The end stage is a separate death. When is enough, enough? These pictures are page-spreads from my book,"Swimming at the Center of the World," which is about my experiences working in China during 2005 and 2006. It's been a very long process thus far and I'm thrilled, actually, to say that the first draft is done, or almost done. So you see, at this point I'm not even close to finally finished. Right now I'm having trouble walking away from the end of the beginning. One of the conversations we have in class is about the moment when your work no longer belongs to you. After all the sweat and anguish - about subject, style, intention, edit, color, contrast, paper, print size, and ending finally with presentation - there comes a time when I have to step back and let it go. At that moment it belongs to the
Read more

Wild Callahan

-
Image
Walking in the winter with Diana and Brendan; I'm not going to not see the Callahan trees surrounding me. Automatic. Can't help it. I know it's cliche. Sorry about that. But there's history here too. The contrast, the sequence, the rhythm, the simplicity. Those Callahan pictures from the 1950s resonate for me; they come to back to me from my earliest thoughts of pictures and photography. Do an image google if you're not sure what I'm talking about. And do you remember the conversation that's in the background, especially of the series of weeds in snow? The story as I recall it is around Callahan's introduction to photography at a workshop in Detroit by Ansel Adams. Apparently there was a long discussion about how to expose properly for snow — how to keep the detail in the negative but not underexpose, how to compensate in the developing, how to print it just down enough to make it feel bright but not too bright. Even if you've never done
Read more

surface

-
Image
i'm thinking about surfaces. is that a picture? the nothing below the something above the flat of it. a question lifts above and hovers. is that a picture? if i walk up to you and breathe will you recoil, sink beneath, or respond. i see a surface and touch nothing, lines. skin. i want to make a picture so i need to surface.
Read more