This week in particular has me thinking a lot about my own past and how I can learn, grow, and try to come up with ways that I will be able to help my own students. And honestly, I have been struggling a little bit with this one, as there have been moments in my time creating where other people's comments have made me stop wanting to make art. I always admired the people who looked unbothered by other people's opinions on my art, because I wanted so badly to be good and liked, wanted people to see something in me and just have someone believe in me, and so critiques always wound me up. They made me feel sick to my stomach, and so I wanted not to care so much, I spent hours wondering how much more productive and successful I would be if I didn't allow other people's opinions to interfere with what I wanted to achieve in life. Last year, I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts with an emphasis in painting from the University of Colorado Boulder. Since then I have barely touched my own artwork. This was highly unusual for me, as I had been drawing compulsively and consistently from the time I was a toddler until my final semester at CU, and I had been highly motivated in the early years of my degree path. At its best, a school can help us develop powerful critical thinking skills and innovative creative techniques, and is worth its price in ways that can't be measured by a future income. Unfortunately, that deep and rewarding learning experience is often accompanied by a tradition of blistering and sometimes humiliating critiques that do not represent constructive feedback or well-intentioned criticism. As the year beyond graduation passed, I have often reconnected with friends I'd met at art school to find they'd had a similar experience. These conversations soon became predictable in a way that made my heart sink. In fact, it was almost always the same conversation. The truth is that critiques can be traumatic. In fact, up until last month, I was defending the harsh criticism I endured during my critiques, accepting and repeating the words and voice of a particularly savage art professor of mine who would crack jokes about people's art while verbally destroying their efforts. I believed this type of discourse was natural and important, that we all needed to hear some harsh criticism about ourselves now and then to wake up and take a hard look at ourselves. I couldn't possibly disagree with my past self more than I do now. I have never met a person who did not carry deep emotions and vulnerabilities, no matter how confident they seemed to be. People live hard difficult lives, full of distractions and many of us struggle to believe in ourselves without the harsh voices of others ringing in our ears. To this day I have not seen criticism create the same results as supportive guidance and feedback. I have, however, seen criticism create immense pain and resentment. And now my own voice is a mantra telling myself You are not weak, you are not deficient, you are not emotionally fragile. You do not need to toughen up. In fact, "toughening up" is very likely at the heart of why you want to stop pursuing your creative passions in the first place. We're often told in art school, either directly or indirectly, that the harsh criticism we endure is designed to build up our tolerance of it. Or, as one professor admitted to me shortly before graduation, to see if it would cause us to stop making our art! In my time at CU, I saw students run from the classrooms with tears of heartache and humiliation on their faces. I saw them stand and sob into their hands through the duration of critiques. Others – myself included – reacted with anger, and critiques devolved into angry shouting matches. I saw little empathy or good intent from professors in many of these critiques, as students' work was compared to the contents of dumpsters or they were told outright in front of their classmates that they were not artists and should change their degree path. I personally was told on more than one occasion that I would never find success with the style of art I was making. In essence school, and particularly critiques are killing the creative passions of thousands of students every year, and many of them are not bouncing back from it. The issue is that Criticism, whether constructive or not, will be a recurring element in any artist's career. The fact of the matter is that, in order to get recognized for our work and make any sort of income from it, we have to constantly put both it and ourselves out there. And, the more we put ourselves out there, the more we open ourselves to others' opinions. So how can we create a safe space to share our thoughts on Art without crushing the spirit of our Artists. 

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This week's reading on critiques has really emphasized the importance of teaching Art criticism. I think an important difference here though is that it focuses on criticism rather than a critique. As we know within Art education, art knowledge is the ability of our students to handle producing art utilizing studio practices and critical thinking skills, but from a teaching perspective we know that we teach these things through studio and skill specific lessons, but also critical knowledge lessons where we delve into art history, appreciation, aesthetics, and criticism. It would be extremely difficult to create and deliver meaningful lessons without including both of those facets in the classroom, in other words, students have to learn how to talk and think about art. The difference between my experience as an Art student and what this chapter highlight is that art criticism is taught, in a way where students learn to think and make criticism and then apply it to their own practices. And art criticism in this case refers to the process of exercising a serious and objective examination of a work of art, it is a talk about art where we discover a deeper meaning of art and clarify our ways of observation when reacting to it. This made me address fully that what I experienced during critiques is not normal, which is a relief. I would never want a student to experience what I personally did, there is an objective way to talk about art and creating in a helpful and not harmful way. These can be employed for checking in and assessing students' work in both summative and formative assessment practices depending on how you are practicing critiques, which I do think can be beneficial. No person should be made to feel as though they are not good enough to be an artist, because really there is an artist inside each of us, and it is our job to teach them not diminish them. And teaching proper art criticism objectively would allow this to happen. 

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This week I added small sections of grid lines throughout my piece gridlines are the light gray lines that separate the cells, rows, and columns on a spreadsheet, which is commonly used in computational software for keeping records of data. I used these to symbolize the rules that I was told to adhere to during art school, or rather what they were teaching me about why I needed harsh critiques. I have them separated and not fully formed to represent that realistically that was a traumatic and incorrect rule, one which I am learning is acceptable to break from now. White stands for everything good and right, and we use it symbolically in opposition to black. White is the color of certainty, of illumination, and of insight, and we associate it with knowledge and learning. I learned a lot from this reading, and so white seemed like the best choice to represent that in this context. 

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It is my sincerest hope that my students won't spend another day away from making the art they love. We all have a unique vision to share with the world, and nothing is more important than keeping that vision alive with clarity and belief. Teaching and talking about art in a critical manner is important, it is important for the individual who is making the art. But our job is to teach not to berate and so I will try to foster an environment where critiques are objective and a helpful environment to share opinions, not like mine. I hope that this will allow my students to grow instead of wilt when creating art.