Chair: Sue Hammond West Administrative Coordinator: Jeff Bolter Advisor: Jenny Dees
Core Faculty
Sue Hammond West
BA, Indiana University
MFA, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Sue Hammond West is a painter and mixed media artist with a hunger for experimentation. She combines art making with the energy of Buddhism and Yoga philosophy. Teaching: The School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Harshaw Creek, Arizona; Steamboat Springs Mixed Media School. Recent exhibits: Boulder Public Library; Radiance Group, Boulder; Beacon Street Gallery, Chicago; University of Notre Dame Isis Gallery. Awards: NEA; Indiana Arts Commission; and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently chair of the Visual Arts Department, she teaches and researches contemporary and ecstatic art forms, and how to infuse art with a palpable haunting presence.
Philosophy
Years ago as a young artist I assisted a powerful artist/art professor in leading free art classes for the community. Repeatedly I saw students of all ages come in hesitant and leave exhilarated! And so my love of teaching art began!
There is a magic when we discover that we can enliven an image.
Art is an open form of communication that evolves powerfully in a supportive environment. Here a vibrant space is held for something extraordinary to happen. Through art making the student discovers their own self-reflected consciousness.
Teaching is a transmission and energy exchange from teacher to student, student to student, and student to teacher. Both intangible and practical connections are important for the transformation of matter and energy. As artist and mentor, I teach from a full expression of candid enthusiasm. I activate contemplative and intellectual investigations where each student discovers their dynamic role as creator in the world.
Robert Spellman
BFA, Massachusetts College of Art
Robert Spellman has worked as a painter, graphic designer, illustrator, piano rebuilder and musician. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and has appeared in numerous publications. He has also practiced and taught Buddhist meditation for twenty-five years; directed Dorje Khyung Dzong, a rural retreat center, for six years; Karma Dzong, an urban meditation center in Boulder, Colorado, for three years; and was chair of the Visual Arts Department for seven years. He is co-founder of Mountain Water, an artist's retreat in the wilds of southern Colorado. Visit http://www.robertspellman.com.
Philosophy
My own educational path has progressed from traditional art college training in western art, to an intensive investigation of mind as it is understood in the Buddhist philosophical systems of India and Tibet. The latter involves a methodical and frequently arduous dismantling of preconceived ideas about reality. One glimpses a marvelous inability to discover any separation between mind and phenomena, subject and object, inside and outside. The western artistic traditions – both ancient and contemporary – contain tantalizing connections to this same ineffable yet powerfully transformative experience. The commonality of meditative practice and artistic insight is at the core of my teaching aspirations.
Caroline Hinkley
BA, Occidental College
MFA, Claremont Graduate University
MFA, California Institute of the Arts
Caroline Hinkley has been a practicing artist and photographer since 1975. Since 1981 she has been living in Boulder and has taught at the University of Colorado in the College of Architecture and Planning, the Art Department and Women's Studies. She has received a NEA/WESTAF award for photography, a Visual Arts Fellowship from the Colorado Council on the Arts, a Neo Data fellowship, and the San Francisco Foundation Phelan Award for excellence in photography. She studied philosophy at Occidental College, painting and drawing at Claremont Graduate University, and social and environmental design at the California Institute of the Arts.
Philosophy
One of the most important relationships in the academic arena is the Student- Mentor relationship. My greatest desire to is to help the student identify their own unique abilities, skills, and intellect and to help them uncover what inspires them most. I believe that from both a western and eastern perspective that a critical examination of the self is the first step to unlocking the imagination in order to deepen creative process and intellectual inquiry. From this foundation, practical skills and conceptual perspectives, historical and cultural awareness can be cultivated and enriched. I encourage the student artist to be a “cultural worker,” to explore their passion for a particular discipline, and to work hard to transform passion into a wholly inspired practice of artistic innovation.
Adjunct Faculty
Joan Anderson
I grew up in Stow Township, Summit County, Ohio, mid-century, in a new house on a dirt road that flooded during thunderstorms. Our house was at the beginning of a wave of construction that would erase the wild places in the landscape that had “spirit resonance” for the children living there.
I was already a painter and calligrapher when I encountered and began practicing the Buddhist teachings of Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche in 1976. That encounter with meditation and a meditation master who was himself an artist continues as a vital force in my painting and teaching.
During six years as co-director of a rural Buddhist retreat center, my life as an artist and a meditator synchronized. In that setting, I experienced again the spirit resonance of a place and of painting’s capacity to reveal it.
Philosophy
“One becomes a painter by painting.” Vincent Van Gogh
This quote is my primary guide in teaching painting.
Learning to paint what comes from the vital, creative core of individual life and learning technical, manual skill, both come from engaging the materials. In the midst of teaching manual skills, I look for and point out when the student’s native expression or true face shows itself, so that they learn to recognize it themselves.
Harrison Tu
BS, China Textile University
BA, Shanghai Educational College
MA, State University of New York at Binghamton
As a devoted artist, Harrison Tu has created numerous works of calligraphy, many of which have been selected for exhibition in the United States, Japan, Korea and Singapore. In these, and other international exhibitions, Mr. Tu has consistently received high recognition and strong reviews. His three calligraphy artworks are the permanent collection and now exhibiting in Denver Art Museum.
2000 Personal Exhibition on Shanghai Library, Shanghai, China
1998 Personal Exhibition on China National Art Museum.
1997 American Biographical Institute (ABI), International Cultural Achievement Award
1996 China National Calligraphy & Painting Contest, Gold Medial
Tu’s art book ---The wisdom and Art of Chinese Calligraphy published by Lingnan Art Publishing House, China. May 1998. A calligrapher’s Yi Jing published by China People’s University Press, 6, June 2004 ,Beijing
Philosophy
In my class, students not only learn the brushstroke skill, but also to learn how poetry, history and philosophy are interrelated in the thousands years of Chinese tradition, how they’re compound each other.
Calligraphy, it can be affirmed, besides being one of the highest forms of Chinese art, it is in a sense the chief and most fundamental element in every branch of it. The beauty of Chinese calligraphy does not lie in symmetry but in dynamic asymmetry. In contemporary society, calligraphy art is still alive. Its so Ancient, yet so Modern.
The practice of Chinese calligraphy is a kind of meditation, to help people to create the inner “Qi”, clean your mind and adjust your emotion, It is a long term healthy exercise.
Marcia Usow
I’ve always been a maker of art. While studying dance at the University of Wisconsin I took some drawing classes which led to a change in my major and leaving the Madison campus for full time study at the Milwaukee Institute of Art. There I completed a BFA granted jointly with the University of Wisconsin. As a graduate student at Purdue University I did further work in sculpture, pottery and printmaking.
Since leaving school I’ve raised two children, devoted myself to the practice and study of Buddhism and developed my pottery career. My current pottery inspiration comes from the Pueblo people of the Southwest and the studio tradition of Japan.
Philosophy
“Everything changes”, is what Suzuki Roshi said to a student who asked for the most concise Buddhist teaching he could give.
A concise description of making art in my world is that it’s an unavoidable human act of elaboration and enrichment. Art requires powers of observation from simple noticing to full blown celebration. Making art also involves some skill and discipline of expression. Mostly making art takes passion. All humans can create and do make art as expressions of their passion, but the work of an artist is to point over and over to the rich array of human senses, a choiceless act of love.
Keith Abbott (core Writing and Poetics), Laurie Doctor, Chris Lavery, Ken Miller, Cynthia Moku, Robert Penn, Ernest Porps
