a day in the life of a travelinggyspyteachingartist..........

The days begins with the alarm going off at 6am. The garden is still.  The sky is starting to lighten up. And the trees are beginning to be filled with tweets from the local birds. I rustle about the house, making sure not to wake the sleeping family members........
I dress. Pack up my bags filled with everything from newspapers, to rolls of masking tape, to cut ups of cardboard, to boxes of paint samples.

I leave the house with tea to go. Often the sky looks like this:



And when the car is packed (looking like a traveling art store gypsy jalopy mobile) I am ready to head into the day - and my days often require me to be at two or three teaching sites.



.......What is a teaching artist?
A teaching artist is an individual with a studio practice who is contracted out by museums or arts organizations to go into schools and develop and support arts integrated learning and curriculums.  A teaching artist helps encourage the "studio habits of mind", and collaborates with classroom teachers.....


When I leave I often have the trusted puppy - who is a beautiful
traveling companion, and she enjoys the terrain in the different areas of this beautiful land. I think she prefers Marin to anywhere else.......

And I feel incredibly lucky to have the opportunity to work with people all day long. No matter how much I plan and prepare and think about the sequencing of the classes, the students take over and transform the lesson into their own.

Teaching is organic.

Sometimes we are sculpting with tinfoil, newspaper,masking tape, and plaster:

Sometimes we are layering and inking making reduction linoprints:

Sometimes students are drawing with graphite developing self-portraits:

And sometimes students are arranging and rearranging with shape and color: