05/06/2022
As a special keepsake of your beloved pet, you have the option to order a premium, archival quality portrait of your pet in your choice of graphite, watercolor pencil (Faber-Castell) or traditional Oriental watercolor preserved in 11" x 14" eco-friendly bamboo frame. Price also includes delivery service: $395
A portion of profits will be donated to The Anti-Cruelty Society in memory of your beloved pet.
Just a little bit of history about me as an artist: It is something inside from my great-grandmother Gussie a painter and, above all, from my faith in Jesus. I have been making wildlife and pet portraits for friends, family and my teachers since I was 8 years old, over 20 years of experience. In that time, my passion for art manifested into science and engineering as innovation starts from creativity and the ability to draw. This is why I have always believed that education should embrace perceptual learning and not standardized testing which is a failing system.
One of my favorite teachers that I have ever had in my life, my 7th grade science teacher Mrs. Meagher commissioned me to make a portrait of her dog Penny. Evidence of the impact that a dog and art can have on people, she was in tears.
Seeing a portrait of your pet everyday brings great comfort more than a photograph because drawing immortalizes your pet.
With this announcement, I would like to include an excerpt from one of my favorite books Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards:
Learning to draw is a boon to happiness, a panacea for the stultifying and uncreative drudgery of standardized testing that our schools have embraced. Perceptual psychologist Rudolf Arnheim wrote: "The arts are neglected because they are based on perception, and perception is disdained because it is not assumed to involve thought. In fact, educators and administrators cannot justify giving the arts an important position in the curriculum unless they understand that the arts are the most powerful means of strengthening the perceptual component without which productive thinking is impossible in every field of academic study." Truly valuable capabilities of the human brain, namely perception, intuition, imagination, and creativity. Perhaps Albert Einstein put it best: "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift, and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift." Our education system seems bent on eliminating every last bit of creative perceptual training of the right side of the brain, while overemphasizing the skills best accomplished by the left side of the brain: memorizing dates, data, theorems, and events with the goal of passing standardized tests. Today schools are not only testing and grading children into the ground, but they are not teaching children how to see and understand the deep meaning of what they learn, or to perceive the connectedness of information about the world. It is indeed time to try something different.
Among people who oppose arts education, drawing doesn't escape the frivolity label, but it is affordable to teach. Drawing requires the simplest of materials--paper and pencils. It requires a minimum of simple equipment and no special rooms or buildings. The most significant requirement is a teacher who knows how to draw, knows how to teach the basic perceptual skills of drawing, and knows how to transfer those skills to other domains. Most parents are very supportive if their children acquire real substantive drawing skills as opposed to the more usual "expressive" manipulation of materials in vogue in recent decades. At around ages seven to nine, children long to learn "how to make things look real" in their drawings, and they are well able to learn to draw, given appropriate teaching. If educators would find a will, there would be a way.
The more we double down on teaching facts and figures, the more we focus on standardized testing, the more left-brained our schools become, the more our children are failing even our own standardized tests, while the dropout rates rise ominously. Albert Einstein once defined insanity as "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." He also said, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." In light of the United States' appalling worldwide standing in reading, math, and science, surely it is time to try something different--namely, to begin purposely educating the other half of the brain in order to maximize the powers of both hemispheres.
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