The knowledge that accumulates in the body of an artist making work generates theory through production rather than about it. Learning to read a surface, to time a decision, or to hold uncertainty long enough to see what it produces, are distinct overlapping epistemologies developed at the foundational level. My teaching centers studio practice as a rigorous site for knowledge production, one that develops specific cognitive and physical capacities that no other discipline fully replicates. I introduce students to this framework early, before market pressures narrow their sense of what making is for.

I teach from inside an active practice. My ongoing research, Spectre, investigates loss of spirit of place through reliquary paintings incorporating site-specific materials from demolished civic spaces; new conceptual work extends this inquiry into questions of language, institutional framing, and the gap between what an image names and what it shows. These are the same questions I ask students to develop the capacity to hold: does the work follow through on its own logic, and what does it leave genuinely open?

My classroom operates as a community built on inquiry rather than a delivery system. I position myself as a facilitator: I set the conditions, model the process, and get out of the way. Students bring their lived experience, cultural knowledge, and perceptual instincts as legitimate intellectual resources. Critique in my courses follows a structured artist-led model in which the artist determines what questions and opinions matter. This structure redistributes authority in the room toward the artist within the work and creates the conditions to trust or question their own perception. By exposing artists to their emerging relationship with authorship they begin developing the capacity to make a choice and see it interpreted by the viewer.

Assessment in my courses treats production as evidence of an experiment and the writing that accompanies it is evidence of learning. My grade system measures integrity of that inquiry alongside skill building, treating productive uncertainty as a tool for learning and positioning risk as the mechanism of growth. In my classroom, practice is the destination — not the masterpiece it might eventually produce. I apply the same logic to my own teaching: when a structural choice doesn't produce what I intended, I treat it as data and adjust my methods.

Whether a student has ever been in an environment where making something with their hands was taken seriously as an intellectual act determines their success rate. Designing for the uninitiated student without losing the initiated one is the central structural challenge addressed by my foundational teaching. In hybrid environments, my single course architecture is reachable at entry with the flexibility to be rigorous at the advanced level, as determined by the student. Small-group critique structures further address skill inequalities in beginning courses, removing performativity and creating conditions for students across experience levels to engage as peers. Smaller table-based peer groups facilitate genuine networking and constructive feedback.

The nonverbal, process-based nature of studio learning creates genuine access for students whose cognitive modes are underserved by conventional academic structures — students who have always processed the world visually, spatially, materially, but rarely been given institutional permission to treat that as intellectual work. For those students especially, the tactile experience of making is not a warmup for real thinking; it is the thinking. I teach detachment from the product as a practice in itself: the goal is students who can work, assess, and continue — who trust the process enough to stay in it when the outcome is uncertain. That capacity, built at the easel, is what a sustained creative life actually runs on.