The Art Room: About Mr. K

I love spending time with my wife and three children--and under the age of 4. I am a teaching artist and enjoy photography, murals and drawing. I work professionally as a photographer shooting sports, portraits and weddings for several different studios. I have a BA in Art and Design with a concentration in Illustration from Columbia College Chicago. I received my Masters Degree in Art Education from Northern Illinois University. I have been an Art teacher since 2006 My two year old says that Daddy goes to work and plays crayons, and he's right! And I can't think of a better job!
Students frequently ask me to share my artwork with them. So here are some photos from some recent projects.

I painted these baggo boards and they were auctioned off at a fundraiser at my previous school.

This is a United Nations mural completed in 08/10.

One of my favorite mediums--pen & ink.

Here's a tribute to two fallen soldiers. It hangs in the gym of these soldiers high school.

Traveling in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, I was fortunate enough to see the Northern Lights AND to have my camera out with me.

10 things learned in Art

1. The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships.
Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.

2. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.

3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives.
One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.

4. The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.

5. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.

6. The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.

7. The arts teach students to think through and within a material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real.

8. The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said. When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.

9. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.

10. The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.

SOURCE: Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press. Available from NAEA Publications. NAEA grants reprint permission for this excerpt from Ten Lessons with proper acknowledgment of its source and NAEA.

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About Mr. K