Category: Process

Art Re-Education Revisited

I’ve been thinking about that phrase.

A few years ago, while attending Friends General Conference, I took a Zentangle workshop. Part of my interest was practical. As a teacher, I was always looking for things I could bring back to my students. At the same time, I was doing some spiritual searching of my own.

When I retired, my intention was simple. I thought I would return to the work I had left behind years earlier when I completed my MFA. While teaching, my focus had been on technology, my students, and teaching itself. I assumed I would pick up where my thesis left off and continue from there.

I did return to my thesis and to its central ideas: how perception and physiology affect our vision of reality.

What I discovered, however, was that too much had changed. The media I was working with had changed. My interests had changed. Instead of continuing where I left off, I found myself asking some of the same questions I had wrestled with in graduate school.

What is my art about?

What am I trying to say?

And what medium is best suited to saying it?

At some point, I began to wonder if I was engaged in a kind of re-education.

Looking back at those early pieces now, I can see that many of them focused on value, texture, repetition, and mark-making. At the time, I didn’t really realize what I was exploring, but now they feel a bit like exercises in learning how to see and do again. To me, that’s my art re-education.

What I do know is that one thing kept leading to another.

A drawing would spark an idea for the next drawing, and little by little my curiosity carried me beyond the boundaries of Zentangle itself. Questions about line and pattern turned into questions about color, surface, and different ways to make marks.

Before I knew it, ink led to watercolor, watercolor led to gouache, gouache led to colored pencil, digital work, and eventually oil paint.

The recent exhibition at Collective Z feels like a milestone along that path. With the show entering its final week, I’ve found myself taking a breath and wondering what comes next.

And perhaps that’s the point: I’m still asking questions.

I’m not sure where the path leads from here, but I’m still eager to follow it.

“Art does not reproduce what we see. It makes us see.”

— Paul Klee

Finding Benton in Michelangelo

The Council Episode of the Battle of Cascina, painted by Bastiano da Sangallo after Michelangelo Buonarroti. A densely packed group of muscular male figures twist, gesture, and struggle in a dynamic battle scene derived from Michelangelo's lost Battle of Cascina cartoon.
Bastiano (Aristotle) da Sangallo (1481–1551), The Council Episode of the Battle of Cascina, after Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1542. This painting preserves part of Michelangelo’s lost composition for the unfinished Battle of Cascina
Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975), Martha's Vineyard. Benton transformed the island landscape into a rhythmic composition of figures, movement, and place, reflecting his distinctive American Regionalist style.
Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975), Martha’s Vineyard.

I was at the Raphael exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I was not expecting much after being at the Vatican and in Rome and seeing so many of Raphael’s works in person. However, the show at the Met was a real eye-opener.

Not only did it present the history and the images, but it also showed Raphael’s education and the many works he studied and used as references for his own work. Specifically, I was enamored by his drawings. The drawings had real life.

What I realized is that as he tightened the renderings, the life gradually faded away. I know I am not in any position to critique Raphael’s work, but that was one of the most amazing things I took from the exhibition.

The other surprise was finding an image created by an artist copying Michelangelo’s work. When I saw it, it reminded me so much of Thomas Hart Benton: the energy, the rhythm, even the lighting and shading.

It revealed to me that Benton, too, must have been deeply drawn to Michelangelo’s frescoes and to the undulating, muscular compositions Michelangelo favored.

One of the things I enjoy most about museums is that you never know what is going to stay with you. I went to see Raphael. I left thinking about Michelangelo, Thomas Hart Benton, and the ways artists borrow from one another across generations. Sometimes the most memorable part of an exhibition is not what you came to see, but the unexpected connection you discover along the way.

“The drawings crackle with nervous energy, which gradually attenuates as Raphael translates spontaneous insights into the cool, lacquered surface of painting.”
— Financial Times

That observation captured exactly what I felt walking through the exhibition.

Fool on the Hill

Abstract pen and ink drawing on paper with symbolic organic forms
Fool on the Hill — ink on Paper, 4 x 5in

— inspired by The Fool on the Hill, The Beatles

🌿 May 22, 2026 — Fool on the Hill

Today “The Fool on the Hill” popped into my head. When I was a kid, I identified with that song, and honestly, I still do.

What hit me today is that the song really isn’t from the fool’s perspective. It’s from the people watching him. Everybody deciding who he is from the outside.

And maybe that’s why it stayed with me.

Sometimes it’s not just feeling like the fool. It’s feeling seen as the fool.

A little outside things. Watching. Thinking. Maybe noticing things differently than other people do.

The song always felt lonely to me, but not completely sad. More like somebody trying to make peace with being different from the flow around them.

Still Working. Still Becoming.

Mapping Existence (2006), pen on paper, 12' × 12'. A large pen drawing tracing my shadow through an eight-hour day.
Mapping Existence (2005)
Pen on paper, 12′ × 12′
Tracing my shadow.

A drawing from 2005, one of a series called Mapping Existence. 

I’ve spent a lifetime around art — teaching it, designing it, selling it, and making it.

Funny thing: becoming a full-time artist later in life may be the hardest chapter yet.

Still working.

Still becoming.

Query

What keeps you doing what you’re doing?

 

Another map made years later, still wrestling with some of the same questions.

 

Serious Play, Solemn Play

Abstract pen and ink drawing inspired by serious play vs solemn play, with flowing maze-like lines and a central vertical form exploring movement, balance, and the space between.
Pen and Ink | The Space Between — 5 × 5 in

Walking Reflection — April 17, 2026 Serious Play, Solemn Play

Years ago, I showed my students at Minneapolis College (MCTC) a video by Paula Scher on serious play vs. solemn play, and I find myself returning to that idea again.

“Serious play is about letting go and allowing things to happen. Solemn play is about controlling the outcome.” — Paula Scher

Years ago, I showed my students at Minneapolis College (MCTC) a video by Paula Scher on serious play vs. solemn play, and I find myself returning to that idea again.

At the time, I understood it pretty simply. Serious play felt open and exploratory, a place where not knowing was part of the process. Solemn play felt heavier, more controlled—something that closed things down.

But now I see it differently.

I think solemn play comes after serious play. Serious play is where things begin—where something opens, and I don’t quite know what I’m doing yet. But then something starts to form. A shape, a direction, a presence begins to emerge.

That’s where solemn play enters. It feels more like a kind of holding. A kind of listening. A willingness to stay with what’s emerging without trying to resolve it. It requires attention.

It’s almost like the kernel forms in serious play, but it begins to take root in solemn play.

Maybe the movement isn’t one or the other. It feels more like a quiet rhythm back and forth—between letting go and staying present, between discovery and care.

Where I am now isn’t about trying to get back to serious play.

It’s about learning how to remain in that space where something begins to take shape,

and then… the conversation begins.