Nineteen years in the classroom. Thousands of students. And at some point along the way, I realized I was teaching art the wrong way.

Not wrong in some dramatic, catastrophic sense. Wrong in the quiet way that something stops working and you keep doing it anyway because it's what you've always done.

So I stopped. Rewrote the curriculum. Researched classical atelier methods—Bargue plates, proportion finding, value sequencing—and rebuilt my approach around fundamentals and observation. I adapted those methods for the reality of a high school classroom: 43-minute periods, beginners who've never held a brush, students who are convinced they can't draw.

It worked. Students who used to shut down started leaning in.

Before teaching, I spent 16 years in graphic and web design, eventually as a project manager and creative director. So I understand systems, sequencing, and how to break complex skills into learnable steps. That background shapes how I think about teaching art, even if it doesn't show up in the work itself.

What This Site Is About

I'm documenting the methods I'm using in the classroom and in my own practice. Some of it is about drawing and painting technique. Some of it is about how to stay engaged with creative work over a lifetime, especially when life has crowded it out.

I'm not going to pretend I have all the answers. But, I have 19 years of watching people learn and a pretty good sense now of what actually moves someone forward.

If any of that sounds like something you need, you're in the right place.

About

Nineteen Years Teaching. One Big Shift.