I believe that attending exhibitions and mastering techniques is not enough to make one an artist. To nourish creativity a person must experience literature, film making, ballet, music and theater. By experiencing all the humanities, whether as the performer or the audience, one is able to understand the many languages of artistic communication.
Visual artists are philosophers reasoning through their images. As philosophers, artists have constant and recurrent concerns reinvented and retold in each work of art. Intuition guides the process, followed by analysis.
Students must learn to acknowledge the concerns they wish to communicate through their art. Then, they should work intuitively, responding to those concerns. Finally they need to analyze their art work through technique and design principles. The teacher's role is to guide the student to perceive and see life experiences to the fullest. In recognizing influences, the student can learn to develop her/his own imagery and individual style, without imitating another artist's style.
