Perhaps you’re visiting this website because, like me, your creative aspirations are entwined in some important way with your personal life. Perhaps you’re at a crossroads or perhaps you intend to continue straight forward and are simply looking for further support. I understand these things because I and many of my colleagues and students have been there — and still are.  Students
gather with me outside my studio during a typical three-day summer workshop intensive. You've probably noticed that a cluster of terms overlap and seem sometimes to blend: teaching, coaching, mentoring, advising, counselling and others. In my years as a working artist, performer, and teacher, I’ve had opportunities to do most of these. But my work is not the teaching of technique or advisement on strategies. It’s an invitation to a mentoring relationship. Mentoring is a partnership. Working together, we define your personal and/or creative goals, and then we redefine or perhaps redirect them as we determine what may be most fulfilling for you. We do this through real conversations during which I generally aim to develop a series of guided exercises that grow from these conversations. These are not based on some psychological theory but on the mentoring connection between us. In the course of this simple process, our aim is to better understand your personal strengths and creative potential, then deepen and expand them. Our lives are ever-unfolding and pass through many phases. The sequence and experience of each phase is the ground for what follows. We may hesitate, then question where we are, and how to move forward, but these times, though difficult, are the very doors through which we pass in order to engage in the next phase. Notice that I refer to your personal and/or your creative life. For me, as an artist and teacher, these have often been the same thing. Your own concerns may be with one or the other — or both. Whatever the case, we’re engaged in a personal process of discovery and through that process we hope to find ourselves better equipped to explore the places that may “scare” us. As I hope you’ll agree, we can view our lives as adventures from beginning to end. Surrendering to the unknown is how we best approach that adventure. Just as I’ve been mentored by others, so I invite you to join with me in an intimate, non-judgmental and personal way so that — as an artist or as a person — you can better witness and explore who you are and so deepen and support your capacity for noticing, creating and responding to the world in which we are living. |
| I've
been teaching most of my adult life — first dance and later visual
arts. Whichever field I've taught in, my real subject has always been
the creative process as opposed to specific techniques. Since 2019,
I've worked with a group of experienced artists who've been exploring
that process to deepen and broaden their own work.. In this photograph, six of these "students" in their COVID masks are engaged in discussion in my studio on Pinnacle Mountain, near Frelighsburg, Quebec. |
