Teaching Philosophy
My best teachers did not teach me: they helped me to learn, and to learn how to learn. One encouraged me to be different from other emerging artists of my generation, and helped me find the way. Another told me freedom was the hardest discipline and then showed me how. There was one who told me he could forgive me anything I attempted and failed, but nothing I failed to attempt. Another encouraged me to value surrender to perception. All my best teachers helped me to enquire, to connect, to trust my intuition, to value doubt, to doubt fashions in art, to be critical and self-critical, to welcome risk, indeterminacy and muddle: and to think big and then double it.
My wish is to help students to enquire and to discover in the way I was helped: with an emphasis on process and the transformation that brings about. And to do so in the spirit of fellow feeling and celebration of our creative difference.
Copyright © Timothy Emlyn Jones 2020