The mentor nourishes a dream in the mentee and sets the mentee into creative flight, tempering idealism with the wisdom of experience.
The Elements of Mentoring by W. Brad Johnson and Charles R. Ridley
I LOVE being a teacher. It wasn’t something I set out to do, but it became so meaningful. Is there a way to take that up a level? I’d say yes, teaching people is an awesome thing to do, but I believe mentoring can be an even more transformative thing to do.
That’s why I am starting a mentoring program in Studio Furniture (artist-made furniture). In addition to learning to master craftsmanship in wood, metal, and plastics, furniture requires design and compositional skills. Also, a deep understanding of physical structure is key. Some of the most remarkable studio furniture flutters between function/non-function.
And it has to be ORGINAL, personally expressive in a way that a few other people will fall in love with what you make.
I started to make clocks not so much to tell the time, but in order to make people THINK about time.
-Garry Knox Bennett
My list of favorite artists is ever-changing, ever-evolving but let’s start with Garry Knox Bennett (Studio Furniture, Alexis Smith (Collage artist & my mentor for a decade), Sam Francis (Painter), Zaha Hadid (Architect), (Mattá Surrealist Painter), James Turrell (Light & Space, skyspaces), Jenny Holzer (poetic text projections), and all of my mentors in art & architecture, continue to motivate me, and open up new worlds.
