“We do not learn from experience...
we learn from reflecting on experience.”
― John Dewey

As a creative arts Summer Scholar, my development process during the summer looked quite a bit different than that of the more research-oriented students. While I may not have been writing papers, organizing literature reviews, or conducting interviews, though, I had as much thinking and researching to do as any of the other scholars.

My summer began with a plan, a general idea of what I wanted my portion of the exhibition in the Creative Space Gallery to look like. Mentor Pamela Drix and I had decided from the date of my proposal submission that my final outcome would be a multi-media installation, not bound to the confines of a single style of art. Before the summer even began, I had started looking into the work of other installation artists who were familiar to me, like Shahzia Sikander, to gain some insight as to what my project might look like. 

Many of the major themes of my work were decided from the onset as well. I'd always planned on working with my family's archive of old photos to reinvestigate my past. Having worked with Professor Drix in Advanced Drawing two semesters prior, where my classwork had touched on similar themes, it made sense to continue this thread, as I was quite happy with many of the pieces that came out of that class. We'd worked with watercolor and gouache in Advanced Drawing too, and I enjoyed the freedom a water-based media afforded me, which is why I continued to work with these materials during the summer, and why I spent a good chunk of time researching other watercolorists like Charles Burchfield.

Something else I'd had planned from the beginning was a deep exploration of religious iconography and symbolism, in relation to my own unique history with the Catholic tradition from which my family comes. I've always had an affinity for Catholic iconography, perhaps because of this personal history, and I've worked with it in a number of past class assignments. I'd hoped to move beyond the simple use of halos and gold to explore the deeper ideas of purity, penance, and original sin in relation to my own growth as a person. As the summer progressed, however, this avenue of exploration got mostly abandoned in favor of pursuing memory and childhood more fully and completely. Part of the challenge with my project was negotiating the lengthy number of themes and ideas I wanted to explore, and learning to simplify things down to most effectively convey my message and narrative. Additionally, some of these more serious topics came off as too heavy handed and direct, detracting from the thread of playfulness that was necessary in a piece dealing largely with childhood. My "Summer of Penance" still remains as a possibility for future exploration.

Perhaps the greatest challenge I faced this summer, though, was the simple act of being creative and producing work on a daily basis. As many professors and students had reiterated throughout our various meetings, working on an independent project means "holding yourself accountable" for the work that you do. As someone who is so used to working under the threat of deadlines and grades, making art for my own sake was a uniquely foreign experience, and not one I could always motivate myself to do. I sometimes went days at a time without making a single mark on a page. There were a number of times where I had to sit myself down and seriously consider who I was doing this for and why.

I still feel that I spent so much time thinking about what I was going to do that I left no time to actually do it. I really wish I had made more art this summer. I'm pleased with the final results, but I always feel that I could be doing something more. Still, this was the first experience I've had with truly self-motivated creation. Learning the nuances of this process is what the Summer Scholars Program is all about, and I've come out of it more aware of my strengths and weaknesses as a practicing artist. At the risk of sounding trite, at the end of the day, it's about the process, not the product.

As any art major or art department faculty can tell you, the biggest logistical hurtles we face as creative people are a lack of money, space, and time. Working in the Creative Space Gallery with the Summer Scholars Program offered me access to all these things and more, allowing me to focus fully on my art.

I'm certain I'm not the only art major to say that I rarely have time for personal work. During semesters where I'm taking art classes (which has been every semester for the past three years) I'm so focused on the required assignments that I have neither the free time nor the energy to pursue anything for my own sake. This is not to say that the classwork I produce isn't by my own volition or about topics and themes I don't personally care about, but it's different. It's different having to work to a deadline on a project that's a necessity for me to complete, that has to fulfill these visual and content-based guidelines. When I'm putting in this much effort in for the sake of a class, I just don't feel like coming home and doing more art.

In many ways, therefore, the defining characteristic of the Summer Scholars Program was the degree of freedom I had in making my work. At the beginning of the summer, I was given my own key to the Creative Space Gallery. I could come in whenever and for however long I wanted. Some scholars took a 9-5 approach in reaching their 40 hours per week, but I frequently stayed into the early hours of the morning or even overnight in the gallery if that's what I was feeling. Being able to devote this kind of time to something on my own terms made it that much more of an authentic artistic experience.

I can't express how nice it was, too, to be able to leave my stuff all over my portion of the room and not have to worry about meticulous cleanup, like I might need to in a shared department space or dorm. Art is messy! My workspace confirms this. For most of the summer, my walls in the corner of the gallery were a jumple of half finished portraits, tiny color studies, large charcoal warmups, reference material, and brainstorming exercises. In a practical sense, sometimes you need to lay everything out to get a real sense of what's working and what's not. Viewing the parts of my work as a whole allowed myself, my mentor, and my creative colleagues to assess what I needed to alter or continue doing and why. But beyond this, the themes of my work - memory as a shifting, changing thing, expressing and expressed through ephemera - required a space that could accommodate and mirror them. My final installation retained much of the eclecticism and multiplicity of the beginning stages of my project because that was the best way to visually articulate how memory works and feels. Having the necessary room in the CSG allowed me to use the wall itself as a picture plane and to push beyond the confines of traditional display techniques, which just wouldn't have been possible in the few spaces I had access to previously.

Part of an immersive educational experience is learning how to be alone with your thoughts and your work, and to process what you see going on. "Watch yourself do your work" is something my mentor Pamela Drix told me throughout the summer. In general, years of education classes have taught me to be increasingly self-aware and self-reflective. Since my project dealt so heavily with notions of identity and the self, these skills were especially important throughout my creative process. 

As with most other summer scholars, I met with Professor Drix approximately once a week to discuss my progress and plans for subsequent days. Meetings with my mentor involved a discussion of any artists I'd been researching, new ideas I'd come up with, and formal critiques of the work I'd thus far produced. Professor Drix had me keep up with a daily journal and sketchbook as well, to help keep my thoughts organized, and to house the more ambiguous ideas that had yet to come into fruition. During the days (and sometimes weeks) where I'd really gotten stuck, sometimes all I'd have to show Professor Drix were a few pencil sketches. She would always use what I already had and what I was thinking about, however, to push me in a new direction and get me to try something new.

As I mentioned, constant self-reflection and self-examination is a necessity in the field of education. Teachers are always reevaluating the ways they present material and work with their students, and being able to accurately judge where things are going well and where they're not is essential to serving your students to the best of your ability. The heightened degree of self-awareness I possess due to the nature of this project will see use throughout the rest of my life as an educator and as a person.

When working on a single, focused project alone for days at a time, it's very easy to get stuck in your own head and see things only from your clouded and warped perspective. There were times this summer when I was frustrated and depressed about the state of my work. I felt that nothing I was doing was good enough and that I had set myself up for failure by even attempting a project of this scale. I hated everything that I was making. Professor Drix was quick to help out, however, and give me a new viewpoint on what I was doing. I'm looking at the same pieces of art every day for hours and hours- of course I'm going to get sick of seeing it. Having a set of fresh eyes to help me process what I was doing every week allowed me to take a step back and observe my work more objectively. 

Apart from these more general characterisics of mentorship, however, I felt incredibly honored to have Pamela Drix as mine because of the guidance and feedback she was able to offer, specific to her and specific to my work. I'd worked with Professor Drix in two of my previous classes, where she was instrumental in helping me develop a personal style and visual iconography specific to the content I wanted to convey, all of which extended into my work this summer. Her unorthodox approaches to artistic techniques, too, melded well with the characteristics of memory that I was working with. Memory doesn't fall neatly into the four corners of a paint canvas, and Professor Drix helped me to see this and embrace it in my work. So many of the details of my final installation- the placement of the hands and the balloons, the usage of negative space, the balance of playful and somber- were a collaborative effort between myself and Professor Drix. My project wouldn't have been what it was without having a mentor who could step back and say "What if we tried this?".

There were times when I got frustrated with having to explain my work to others, however. Waiting for me at the end of the summer was an exhibition open to family, faculty, and friends alike, and important to the shape of my project was how I would communicate its deeply personal significance to a larger, varied crowd. Such is the spirit of the Summer Scholars Program- how to express both the "what?" and the "so what?" to those not involved in your discipline or in this specific process of creative inquiry. But there were times when I wanted to be alone with my work and pursue it the way I saw fit, without having to worry about what other would or would not "get" from it. I was a difficult student to deal with sometimes, and Professor Drix was always understanding. She was willing to give me the time alone that I needed to calm down and sort through things on my own. The Summer Scholars Program is, ultimately, something I was doing for my own sake. Knowing when to give guidance and when to let me work through something myself was a difficult line to walk. Professor Drix negotiated it beautifully and I couldn't be more thankful.

The core philosophy of the Ithaca College Art Education program is that artists make the best teachers. Knowledge of technical skills alone is not enough to adequately educate students on demands required of making art, in the context of the classroom as well as in their individual pursuits. To fully understand how one's students struggle and learn, the teacher too must do the same. Personal experience with the challenges of art making- having failed, having succeeded, and having tried, tried, tried again- better prepare educators to guide their students through these same struggles. This was my primary reason for having applied to the H&S Summer Scholars Program. 

As an art education major, the entire spring semester of my senior year is dominated by student teaching, meaning that I don't get to engage in a senior art thesis like the B.F.A. art majors. As such, I never have the opportunity during the normal school year to grapple with the sustained, self-determined process of art making. Though the work I produce in my classes is of course challenging and of deep personal and education value, it's not the same as producing an entire body of work for my own sake. Thus far, I've only gotten to be in the role of student, and not the role of artist. 

The Summer Scholars Program has afforded me the opportunity to work as a professional artist does- on my own terms, creating my own work at my own pace. The difficulties and struggles I faced over the summer are akin to what artists everywhere experience on a daily basis, and how my students will feel at some point during their creative journeys as well. Now that I've been in the role of the artist, I can better understand what creative struggle really means. I can recognize it in others, too, and help them work through it. 

While the two months I worked over the summer was certainly enough to develop a full installation for display, there are a number of ideas I had that I never got to follow through with, and would love to return to at some point during the future. The Summer Scholars Program is an inquiry-based learning experience, and takes as much pride in process as it does in product. So many avenues of exploration opened up to me by working on this project, and I now have the tools and skills to tackle them when I find myself with the time to do so. Creating a large portfolio of artwork will be necessary once I start applying to graduate art programs, and the work I've done over the summer has given me a tremendous head start.