Traces of Self

Traces of Self is a series of abstract acrylic paintings created over a year amongst my high school art and design students, working on them in small increments in our art and design classroom, and using leftover paint the students no longer wanted. During the painting process, while everyone was working, I actively engaged them and asked questions about my own work, seeking their critique and insights, just as I would with their work. It is a way to connect with my art students, so they can see what I do as an abstract artist and as an entry point to discuss abstract expressionism and inner emotional life. 

This body of work continues my ongoing research into the intersections of psychoanalytic theory, art education, and aesthetic experience, considering painting as a symbolic practice for expressing inner emotional states. The series explores inner feeling, fragmentation, and movement as essential conditions of being. The material process of acrylic painting mirrors the psychic act of teaching. In this way, Traces of Self reflects both a personal and a pedagogical question — how art can hold, translate, and give form to the emotional complexity of the teacher's inner experience.

Dispersed Together: Art in a Time of Distance

Dispersed Together is a series of abstract mixed-media works created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. These paintings explore this global crisis in various ways—how individuals were separated in their own communities, police brutality in America,  wide spread grief and loss, and more. 

Through layers of paint, graphite, and collaged drawings, each work captures the disorientation and the profound emotional impact of that period. Fragmented structures dissolve into gestures, emotional atmospheres, unfinished and distorted human figures, and traces of inner feelings—evoking the blurred boundaries between safety and exposure, the private and the public, and the body and its environment.

The series explores how aesthetic experience serves as a form of emotional processing, based on my subjective experience of the pandemic—hearing stories about loved ones, the sick, periods of intense grief and anxiety, personal loss, and communities and individuals who were profoundly affected by both the pandemic and police brutality. 

These works serve both as autobiographical documents and collective reflections—visual meditations on how art can hold and contain the weight of crisis.

Teaching as a Design Process

Teaching as a Design Process comprises of mixed media work created during 2014-15 in response to various assessment processes in art education. The works Tracking, Tracking Assessment, Levels, and Preserving, as well as four other paintings (not pictured in this project sample), were part of the art exhibit “Demo Studio, Teaching as a Design Process” at D Center, Baltimore, MD, in 2014. The exhibit was documented in the article, Assessing Assessment: Art-Teaching Should Also Be Art-Making, in Bmore Art, by Terence Hannum on September 15th, 2014.

This project was part of an assessment research study group that consisted of in state and out-of-state professional art educators and Maryland Institue College of Art (MICA) professors and spanned over a year’s worth of work in 2014, creating and responding visually to various assessment models for teaching visual arts in the K-12 setting. The purpose of the study group was to invent creative ways to assess student artwork in the K-12 setting. We primarily used Google Hangouts and met remotely regularly throughout the year. 

In this particular project, I shared my Action, Reaction Assessment Model that I developed with two other art educators in the study group, Lisa Perkowski, art teacher at Academy of the Holy Names, Tampa, FL, and Lauren Cook, Art teacher at St. Andrew’s Episcopal, Potomac, MD. I visually responded to Lisa and Lauren’s high school studio assessment models and vice versa.  Through artistic exploration, I began to discover new meanings behind the physical and conceptual arrangement of the two rubrics. My visual responses explored the vertical, hierarchical, structural, and conceptual elements of the assessment models through paintings, mixed-media pieces, and a linoleum relief print.

For one example, Tracking, includes watercolor paint, marker, pen, and a collaged painting. I worked in layers and used vivid colors responding to Lisa’s assessment model, “Tracking Progress”, a rubric used to measure students’ progress over the course of the semester. Tracking and other visual responses lead me to explore social and narrative assessment tools as key elements in generating new assessment practices for my middle and high school classroom. 

These narrative tools include encouraging students to explore studio-based reflections, peer-to-peer interactions about their work, and peer- and adult-sharing strategies. The visual responses were essentially an iterative, playful, and exploratory process of examining how Lisa and Lauren’s assessments function in theory and in the classroom.