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Teachable Moments in Painting


I've started a new cycle of teaching recently and have been doing workshops on a weekly basis.   Every time I teach I am learning as much as my students.   

 

My most recent education involved doing a painting demonstration which seems to be standard practice in the art-teaching field.  An instructor starts the class by creating a painting in front of the students.  I like to call it "Painting without a Net".  When doing so there can be successes, but when failure is met, it is a teachable moment for me and the students.    The instructor has time constraints.   Demos often do not result in one's best work.   The best I can do is tell students where I went wrong in the process and hopefully we all learned from it.

 

Doing a demonstration well takes time.  Frankly the students are usually not interested in spending time watching you paint.  They are there to paint themselves, especially if the workshop is only a few hours long. 

 

As a result, I've learned to change my demonstration method.  Now I start painting at the same time as the students but tell them when I arrive at a salient point that needs explaining, I invite them over to watch what I do.  This way my demonstration is stretched over the length of the workshop.   The result is a better painting  by me and provides more time for the students to paint.  Everyone wins this way. 

 

 


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