When Teaching Informs My Studio Work (and Vice Versa)
One of the questions I get asked a lot is how I balance teaching with my studio practice. Usually people expect me to talk about time management, exhaustion, or how hard it is to fit my own work into an already full schedule. And yes, there are definitely semesters where everything feels packed and the studio ends up squeezed into whatever time is left over. But the longer I’ve done both, the less I see them as separate things competing for attention.
My teaching and my studio work constantly feed into each other. The classroom changes the way I think about my work, and my studio practice changes the way I teach. It feels less like balancing two opposing forces and more like being in an ongoing conversation that keeps moving back and forth between them.
When I first started teaching, I imagined it very differently. I thought teaching would be one part of my life and my studio practice would be another. I figured I would teach during the day and then return to my own work afterward. What actually happened was that the two started bleeding into each other almost immediately. Teaching kept pulling me back to fundamentals like composition, hierarchy, color, texture, rhythm, and process, and revisiting those ideas constantly changed the way I approached my own work.
One thing teaching does really well is force clarity. In the studio, I can follow instinct without fully explaining it to myself. I can move something around because it feels right or change a color because I know the piece needs it. In the classroom, I have to slow down and explain those decisions out loud. If I’m teaching a lesson on hierarchy or negative space, I can’t just say “this works.” I have to explain why it works, what’s happening visually, and how those decisions affect the composition. The more I teach those ideas, the more aware I become of where I’m coasting in my own practice.
I notice this especially when I talk to students about iteration. I constantly remind them that the first idea is usually not the strongest one, and that pushing through multiple versions almost always leads somewhere more interesting. Every time I say that in class, I hear it bouncing back at me later in the studio. It reminds me not to settle too quickly in my own work and to let things stay unresolved a little longer before deciding they’re finished.
Students affect my practice in other ways too. One of the best parts of teaching is seeing how differently other people approach the same problem. Students will combine materials in ways I wouldn’t think to. They’ll make strange choices that somehow work. They’ll ignore rules that I’ve internalized over years of making, and sometimes that leads to fresher results than anything I would have planned myself.
I’ve had students layer imagery in ways that initially felt completely wrong to me, only to realize later that their approach had an energy my own work was missing. I’ve watched students move easily between digital and analog processes while I was still mentally separating those things into different categories. Their willingness to experiment reminds me to loosen up a bit in my own studio practice and stop overprotecting the way I think things are “supposed” to be done.
Teaching also keeps me close to the basics in a useful way. When students struggle with composition or color or spatial relationships, it reminds me how important those foundations actually are. I can’t just assume I’ve moved beyond those things because I’ve been doing this for a long time. The fundamentals still matter, and watching students work through them pulls me back into paying attention to those details in my own work too.
At the same time, my studio practice changes the way I teach. Because I’m actively making work, I can bring real examples into the classroom instead of speaking in abstract terms all the time. I can show students unfinished pieces, failed attempts, drafts, experiments, and revisions. I can walk them through decisions while they’re still messy and unresolved instead of pretending the process is always clean and confident.
When I was working on my Echoes of Eve collage series, I brought pieces into class while they were still in progress. Students saw taped fragments, awkward transitions, sections I ended up tearing apart and rebuilding. They saw how much adjustment happens before something finally settles into place, and that kind of honesty in the classroom matters to me because I think students need to see that uncertainty is part of the process for everyone.
A lot of students assume professional artists always know exactly what they’re doing, and I think it helps when they see that I still second-guess compositions, still get stuck, and still change direction halfway through something. It makes the process feel more human and less intimidating, which is important because uncertainty is not a sign that you’re failing. It’s part of figuring things out.
Of course, there are semesters where teaching takes a lot out of me. There are weeks where grading, prep, meetings, and emails leave very little energy for the studio. But even during those stretches, teaching usually keeps me connected to creative thinking in some way. I’ll spend an entire morning talking about texture or visual rhythm in class, and later that same day I’ll find myself wanting to test those ideas in the studio.
And sometimes it goes the other direction. If I’m deeply invested in a new series or experimenting with a new process, that excitement carries into my teaching. Students can tell when I’m genuinely engaged in making work, and it changes the energy of the room. The overlap even shapes the assignments I create. A lot of classroom projects begin with something I’m experimenting with myself. If I’m interested in layering methods or limited palettes or image transfers, there’s a good chance those ideas will show up in a future assignment or demo.
At the same time, student projects circle back into my work all the time. I’ll design an exercise around rhythm or repetition or visual tension, and halfway through teaching it I’ll suddenly realize I want to explore the same idea in my own studio practice. That exchange never really stops, which is probably why I no longer think of teaching and making as separate categories in my life.
The longer I teach, the more I realize these two roles depend on each other for me. Teaching keeps me sharp, curious, and reflective. Studio work keeps me grounded in actual making and reminds me why the classroom matters in the first place. Some semesters feel more balanced than others, but over time the relationship between the two has become one of the most sustainable parts of my creative life.
Without teaching, I think my work would get too isolated. Without my studio practice, my teaching would feel disconnected from the reality of making things. Most of the growth in my work has happened in that overlap between the classroom and the studio, where ideas keep moving back and forth between the two.
