Jeremiah Patterson lives and works in South Deerfield, Massachusetts. He teaches painting and drawing as a Professor of Foundations at the Hartford Art School, University of Hartford in West Hartford CT.

Jeremiah’s artwork is unique in that he uses traditional methods of painting to create highly realistic watercolor and egg tempera paintings. In recent years he has been working in churches to design and paint the interiors. His inspiration for his work is found in his love for Renaissance, Dutch and Flemish painters.

Erika: I decided to interview you because I feel like you have the balance of both a professional artist and educator.

Jeremiah: Thank you. Well, that's so meaningful to me.

Erika: I have some icebreaker questions first, and then we're just going to run into the rest. So what's your earliest memory of your favorite educator?

Jeremiah: Mrs. Domina, who was my first-grade teacher, I have vague memories of kindergarten. I definitely remember her; she was very ahead of her time. I was that odd kid who was quite shy when I was younger. I was pretty smart, even as a little kid, you know, I was a very observant of the natural world. That probably led me to where I am now. But, well, I was not assimilating I guess, to the classroom. I don't know the whole story. This is recounted to me, you know, from my mom and my dad but basically, she allowed me to bring my Guinea pig into the classroom and have them live under my desk in a little 10-gallon fish tank aquarium size. She lived out in Covington in a cottage house out in sort of a farm area. She used to talk about going on walks and seeing the beavers that were on her property, and all these things. I mean we just hit it. I hit it off with her because of that; she was into nature and animals. But I guess years go by and you learn the true story of that, and that was that she saw a need for me to have like a little companion animal to help adjust, and then I adjusted just fine from that point onward.

Erika: It almost taught you responsibility and being present in the classroom.

Jeremiah: Yeah. I think this, this sort of ahead-of-her-time thing is that now you know I have a student or two that will come and have a uh a support animal. Yeah, they’ll ask if they can have their support animal with them and um and this is something that’s much more common now but back then that was unheard of to have that sort of thing. She was in tune with the needs of people and was a real humanist, a real naturalist. So I definitely remember her first grade. She was a tremendous teacher, and continues to be one of the most impactful early teachers I’ve ever had.

Erika: That’s really beautiful. I love that your first memory of your favorite teacher was your first memory of your favorite teacher was your first memory of your favorite Educator, someone who is from your early childhood,

Jeremiah: Yeah, early, early, yeah. In terms of art, my it for me it’s my dad, my dad is an artist and a teacher.

Erika: I remembered that, yeah.

Jeremiah: As soon as I showed sparked interest in drawing and things like that, he very gently took me under his wing and just essentially his studio was open and you know I was able to do a lot of things. I have four kids in my family, I’m the second of four, he saw that I was the most interested. Primary education, I remember Mrs. Domina for sure.

Erika: That's pretty awesome. What has been your biggest learning curve as an artist and educator?

Jeremiah: It's a good question. I've learned a lot about how to teach, and I think I look back on your early years and in fact I'm trying to remember how far you and I go back in order to make sure that I was a decent enough teacher. I think I'm a better teacher now and I do look back at my earliest years and think 'oh gosh, why did I do that?' You know, I was following Instincts and instincts, over time, I think you do learn strategies that are better, and instincts improve, I think. The biggest learning curve I think has been, well it continues to be, would be a work-life balance. That is, that I always have felt that I'm the most effective educator if I'm making myself the example all the time, you know, if I can't see teaching somebody how to do something without walking the walk. I think the biggest learning curve in terms of how to make sure I'm on my I'm on my edge teaching is that I'm always the best teacher if I'm also making and I'm active in it because that itself is a learning process, you know. Everytime I make a work of art I'm learning something new and I'm being challenged, and it reminds me, you know, like when I'm assigning an assignment to a student well I'm asking them to rise to the occasion. If I can’t rise to the occasion myself, then how can I expect them to follow through either? I think another learning curve is, certainly, knowing the capacity for each student to rise to their best, that's something that continues to like my radar is continuing to refine on, knowing just when to have a student that might be plateauing or even if they're struggling a little, to when it's appropriate to nurture the struggle or when it's appropriate to kind of come down a little bit hard and say, 'Okay, time to get it done.'

Erika: Yeah. Can you tell me a little bit about how the Hartford Art School has influenced your view as an educator as an artist?

Jeremiah: Yeah I can definitely say they do they're they've generally over the years been fairly supportive of of having artists who teach. I think in the very recent last few years we are struggling a little bit with the university bureaucracy and making sure that they continue to value us as artists who teach, as opposed to teachers who make art right? That has been a good connection for me because I do know of other friends and colleagues that teach at institutions, even college level institutions where there are teachers who are allowed a little bit of time on the side to make art. That's why I landed at Hartford and stayed. I don't think I'm a valuable teacher unless I'm making and have the time to make. So the institution has to support that to a degree that if they don't, if I was at a school where that wasn't supported. I wouldn't feel that I couldn't continue teaching there effectively.

Erika: It wouldn't be a life that you would want.

Jeremiah: Yeah it's all intertwined you know, for that reason that's definitely the case and I think for most of my time in teaching at Hartford there has also been a fairly, rigorous set of standards on what is expected of students. I think that was something when I first started teaching. I had several colleagues that I think we're really instrumental in in setting that standard, you might remember Fred Wessel was one of them. Do you remember Fred?

Erika: Yeah

Jeremiah: Really good person. If you wanted to learn a little bit more about art and from Fred, he’d give you the shirt off his back. But he expected excellence, and you know he was tough on that. Stephen Brown was another very easy going teacher, much more easy going than Fred. Students loved him, but he expected you to be an Artist and every day he was one, every day he led by example in that way. Dennis Nolan, my colleague, out of the three I’m mentioning, only Fred is still alive. Dennis passed away a couple years ago, but he was so gentle; he was like a wizard; he was just, he hardly said three words, but he was so gentle with the students; and again, he just led by example. So, that to me; I mean when I got hired into teaching, and that was the playing field, I realized right away, okay, this is it. It worked for me first of all, that mentality worked for me; but also, I was surrounded by a lot of people that lived it, and so I had a good example to follow.

Erika: It’s so funny, you say that because my next question was, how do you adapt your lessons based on the skill level of your student?

Jeremiah: Yeah, so that’s definitely improved as well over time and part of that is because I think I’m looking back at your generation of the hartford art school compared to right now. We have more students that are in need of a better education. I think it’s a need of early basic training as opposed to when you were in school. You had a very strong portfolio review to get into the school and so there was a process of, I would say, weeding out some students that probably weren’t quite prepared for. The rigor and over the years that has definitely been, less and less enforced; let’s just say, and I think it’s a neat thing. I think you’ll find this in any higher education: we’re in a time right now where colleges are trying to survive, we can’t afford to turn away every student, you know, or we have to sometimes accept a student that we might not have accepted 20 years ago. So what it does in the classroom is it’s created a classroom with quite a bit of variation in readiness; I haven’t changed my expectations of excellence. I have changed my assessment of that in terms of figuring out where that starting point is with that individual so you just do what you have to do, I mean I have no problem having a whole moment’s lesson around a trash can showing somebody how to properly sharpen a pencil. I just have no problem teaching that; I don’t demean it; I don’t look down at that. For me, if somebody doesn’t know how to read a ruler, how to sharpen a pencil, that’s a teaching moment. That if I you know, you have to tread carefully on these moments because, yeah sure, 18 years old and you know you’re old enough to go to war or vote, so you probably shouldn’t sharpen a pencil, but the proper method for an artist is there’s a there’s something to that, and it’s not just a rudimentary skill. So I’ve never had a problem taking it right down to like that level, and and I’ve always, I think, a motto I’ve tried to live by is, ‘Never look down on somebody because they’re young,’ you know, don’t look down at somebody because they might be less advanced in their life, right? So just take it, take it for what it is, and teach them what you can teach them.

Erika: I’m currently a student teacher at middle school level, so at the beginning of this school year my mentor teacher gives them an assessment to see what their skill level is at, and then bases her scope and sequence for the rest of the year on how each individual student had done on the assessment. I think it’s really important, especially for middle school level because you’re just seeing if they know-right?

Jeremiah: You know they are coming out of sixth grade elementary school, yeah that’s kind of that large jump, right? So in our town they go from the elementary school physically and they jump to a different school into that middle school so there is a complete overhaul of their life they’ve had. Seven years in this one building, and then it’s a completely new building and a new beginning, so an assessment makes complete sense. What I do, Erika, and you might remember this is I sign a rigorous first project, yeah, and it’s like, we’ll meet on Thursday and I say due date is Tuesday, you have one weekend and I get you know sometimes the students will freak out and I’ll just look at them and be, ‘Say like, well look at suck it up, buttercup! You’re in college; this is not such an easy street anymore!’ And yeah, it’s a good time. I do that purposefully in this environment. When I first started teaching I’m going to have at least a student or two if not three that have never ever ever drawn themselves. Or in some cases have never drawn a human’s face or head ever and so that used to be not the case. Yeah, when they come in I look at them and I can tell the student sometimes worries about their quality. I reward them, first thing I ask is how many self-portraits have you ever done and when they reveal, ’oh this is my first one ever’ then the conversation becomes wow that’s it doesn’t matter how unrefined it is at that point because you’re making your first one and that’s an achievement in itself. I really have a good sense of okay. I know where this student is in terms of how far along they are and what their background was. Where they need to go, what do I mean a lot of what we do in teaching art is experience based.

“It’s just like teaching cooking in ways, right, if nobody’s ever folded a croissant properly, you have no idea how to do it right. It’s a skill, and there’s two things with teaching art, it’s the development of the mind and then the development of the hands and the skills. You can’t separate the two, so just like teaching cooking, if somebody has never ever done something then that’s something you have to know and assess and meet them at their point right.”

Erika: Yeah. Can you tell me a little bit about how the Hartford Art School has influenced your view as an educator as an artist?

Jeremiah: Yeah, of course. I do value the people I work with, and I try to lead by example of being someone that is respectful of all others and their differences. I’ve only had a couple of colleagues that I wouldn’t like to work with, and I would like to work with say we absolutely just did not get along clearly. I respect what they do, I respect that they do what I can’t do and I hope that they reciprocate that and that we all have a little place. I can’t teach students digital technologies very well, I’m pretty defunct with that. So I have colleagues that can do it wonderfully. I try to send them that direction and I hope that when they find a young person that wants to draw from nature, that they would send them my way.

Erika: For sure. I loved and I still carry to this day the lessons in plein air that you taught me, and that is very, very apparent in my work.

Jeremiah: Yeah, I know, I remember those days, I could see the spark.

Erika: Yeah, yeah, for sure. What’s a memorable experience that shifted the way that you approach your art?

Jeremiah: Yeah, there’s been many, so now that I’ve been at this a long time because I used to think I was an emerging artist, I better have emerged at this point. I better have emerged at this point because it’s been too long. So it’s actually interesting. I just went to a symposium in Texas on watercolor and I was a presenter. I was meeting some people for the first time and they were quite amazed when they started learning about my career. They had not completely realized that I had this incredibly vibrant career until about 2009. Then things shifted and changed a little bit. At this event, at the symposium people were like wow you were published in a watercolor magazine in 1997 that’s so long ago. I remember your article and oh yeah and you know like so people were kind. In some ways I was surprised and I guess it was flattering and touching.

Anyway, to the point of your question, there have been several things that have caused evolution and shift. I can tell you right off the bat: 9/11 when that happened, I was becoming pretty well known in the world of American watercolor for still life. I had a New York gallery on 57th Street who had promoted my work into some of the number one shows for this and my name was coming up as the next generation of watercolor still life American still life painters; and when 9/11 happened, it was as you know, it was shocking right so shocking. I just started thinking about why I was painting stuff like I’m making. I mean, I would say I’m still very proud of all the work and I consider them beautiful artworks that had a place in time. I really had a moment where I was like, ‘You know people are so much more important to me.’ By the way, you probably remember my first daughter Anna was born only weeks after that, yeah? So, this happens and of course it shocks the whole world, and then my daughter is born, my first, and I just started thinking, Actually there was a, factual part of that, which was all the shows that were scheduled, were off the charts, like a God, no shows, no need for sending work to New York because nobody was buying it. That went on for 18 months. Of course, everybody in the country was going through much worse than that. To lose some income and all that was just whatever to me, it was like, there was way other bigger fish to fry, but then my daughter’s born and you know, the feeling of this. Right. just thought it’s going to lead to something So I became very, um, blasé about painting stuff and making still lifes except that I, I still loved it in a way. It’s hard to explain this, but I still loved it in ways. I came to this moment where I thought I really, really want to paint people. I really want to get into people’s lives; it’s one thing, you know, you can only have so many conversations with a tomato, you know, I mean, really. I wanted I wanted to have conversations with people, I wanted to figure out how to do that. I knew that I had potential to do that, but I wasn’t really mature enough. I don’t think artistically, I wasn’t mature enough. I felt like I just had to dive in the pool. So I really stopped still life for about 10 months right after 9/11. I drew my daughter every day when I do a drawing of my daughter. I just thought that would be my way to figure out how to deal with people. I’ll just draw her because she’s here and I love her. I have that connection, it will lead to something. I just thought it’s going to lead to something.

Erika: She’s almost a still life in a way, because at that point in time, they aren’t moving, you know?

Jeremiah: Well, there were moments where she was definitely still. So I was able to do that.

Erika: Yeah.

Jeremiah: She was also active alert, you know? I didn’t have to worry about making still lifes and sending them to New York for clients who wanted the next one. That was what was going on prior to that. So in some ways, as hard as that whole time was, I look back at it as kind of a blessing in, you know, you always try to always try to find some blessing in something that really was hard to find a blessing in that whole event. What it did for me on a personal level is it just slowed me down. Cause I had been like, make a still life, send it to New York. The next collector was buying it because they wanted the next one. Then I was making another one, and I was painting 25 paintings in 18 months for one person show after another. Every 18 months, I had three or four or five, one person shows one after the other, they were selling them all. My dealer kept selling them all. Then she’d go, ‘Oh, I need another one.’ So it got to where it was like, I was making paintings of things and people were loving my paintings of things. I just thought, ‘I don’t know if I’m in love with painting things as much as I need to be to keep doing this.’ So I didn’t, and my art dealer kind of got annoyed at me. I had conversations with her. So when, when are we going to see the next still life? I said, well, I’m not probably not going to do one. What are you talking about? You know, Jeremiah, you’re throwing your career away. So I said, okay, I’ll throw my career away. I just thought it was, I’ve never had fear of that sort of thing. I’m going to make what I need to make. If I’m not in love with it, it’s going nowhere. I truly loved making the still lifes when I did, but that whole event and everything around it and the birth of my daughter really kind of reframed it in a way that I couldn’t unpack. So I moved on to making more still life pieces. I’ve been doing them. I just did a new one about two weeks ago. And I’m in love with that. I found a way to re-love it. My wife even sometimes now she’ll say, ‘Oh, I see you brought out your old mistress’ and will laugh about it, you know, but I’ve now also made paintings of people. So there’s a whole series of figure art, figurative paintings. I also got out into the landscape and that was another thing that happened around that same time where I had to just figure out how to paint for just the sake of painting for no real connection to anything, except I want to be out in nature. I simply wanted to study the effects of natural light on the landscape and what would happen when I worked with it. So I’d started making a lot of landscape work, which, that’s like a whole genre of my work.

“Now at this point, I just, when it was in a recent interview, they asked me, what do you paint? I said, I think I paint the nouns of the world, people, places, and things. I’m in love with all of them for certain reasons, but what I think of as my subject matter are the nouns. As the artist, I hope to put adjectives connected to them.”

Most recently for the people stuff. I have a series of, so we had to teach in person during COVID. We shut down in March of 2020, and I had to go to online teaching for that end of the spring semester of 2020. You probably remember this whole episode, right? Cause we all lived through it. Over the summer, I was in training sessions to learn how to basically teach in person and teach this kind of what they call the hybrid model, because the university said to us, anybody who can teach in person needs to, if we don’t, the university is going to just close. So I had to teach in person the fall of 2020, and moving into the spring of 2021, one of the courses I taught was figure drawing. The regulations of the university were such that I had to have my nude models come into the studio, they had to remain six feet away from everybody in the studio. Everybody was spread out really far, and we were limited to 12 students in the class because of it, which was fine. I had to be careful about coming around to the students closely to teach them. So I had a whole setup with a projector and a teacher’s table and a remote camera that I could project. I could do little lessons on the side and show them how to project. But the model would model nude and had to wear a mask. That whole thing to me became almost like a Fellini movie.

Erika: Yeah, for sure.

Jeremiah: I think it was maybe the second week of the semester, I turned to all the students and I said, ‘Listen, I’m going to just project and draw. I’m going to project what I draw. Because this is a moment in time that we’re never going to recreate. I need to document it along with you. So I gave them lessons every day, and I did my lessons. During drawing time, instead of going around and looking at their work on a more personal level, I would do a quick go-around.

Erika: Yeah, you’re modeling.

Jeremiah: I would draw; they would kind of, every so often, they’d watch what I was drawing on the screen. I have a whole series of drawings of them, because they’re just, when you look at the drawings, they’re so weird. They ask more questions than they answer in a way.

Erika: But that’s what art history is, it’s documenting moments in time that we will never get back, right, right.

Jeremiah: I have these drawings on the side, so that things like that have happened. When my art dealer’s gallery closed in 2009, Sherry French’s gallery closed; I decided very decisively I wasn’t going to run around and seek new gallery representation immediately. I thought, you know, I’m going to take some time to be a free agent, and little did I know that would continue to last basically till this day. I’m a bit surprised that I’ve been a free agent as long. I do have work in a few galleries; I have a work in a gallery nearby, and I have work in Italy in a gallery, but they’re galleries that are really good to me, and they really respect that I want to do what I want to do, so there’s not this pressure: ‘I need this, you need to make this for the next; don’t feel like a machine. So I’m picking and choosing for churches and doing sacred works, and I’ve been hired to renovate and redesign whole church interiors, and design gigantic panel paintings for a church in Chicopee, Massachusetts. I was essentially the foreperson for all the interior design and architecture, not the architecture, but the interior design choices for the decorative work inside of the Newman Center Chapel at UMass Amherst. Now I’m talking with St. Thomas Church in West Hartford, not far from the school, and they’re basically hiring me to come in and consult on the whole renovation of the interior, changing the whole decorative scheme. So if the contract with St. Thomas is written, as I expected, it would be, that’ll be the fourth church that I’ve made artworks for and renovated. I never saw that coming, but when the opportunity popped up in 2015, I was a free agent, so I didn’t have to ask an art dealer permission to go and work with this church nearby that needed a redo and a renovation and they needed a complete re-overhaul of the interior. So, yeah. They hired a company to do the work, which involved the painting, the industrial-level painting, and then I made artworks for the design. I was the person kind of in charge of the design, as well, but they followed my lead, and I would go in and say, ‘yeah, no, that color isn’t right.’ So that started in 2015, and then it just, I don’t know, I’ve gained a bit of a reputation, I guess, and so that every so often a church will contact me and say, ‘can you help us? We need somebody to consult with.’

Erika: It seems like a lot of influences from your travels to Italy have kind of flowed.

Jeremiah: That’s what I lean on, absolutely. I lean on that. I’ve been really blessed to see a lot of places of worship and a lot of the old ones and the famous ones. So I have, like, this catalog, this visual catalog of what’s possible. And I think currently, it’s interesting, currently I’m being asked because a lot of these churches want something that has more of a style that has roots. It’s an interesting dynamic so I’m going to ride the wave as long as it goes and see where it leads. It’s led to some incredibly interesting projects recently, yeah, where I’ve been I felt like I was really impacting in a different way. It’s a very interesting experience, just the other day I had to go to a funeral for somebody that I knew. In the church where my painting hangs above the main altar and it’s a crucifix painting and in the christian faith that’s like that’s like the number one thing yeah right? There it is above right this person’s remains and the family is looking to that image for comfort and I was like and I made it. Yeah, it’s kind of a weird thing.

Erika: It’s almost poetic in the way that your traditional style has come full circle.

Jeremiah: I think it was maybe the second week of the semester, I turned to all the students and I said, ‘Listen, I’m going to just project and draw. I’m going to project what I draw. Because this is a moment in time that we’re never going to recreate. I need to document it along with you. So I gave them lessons every day, and I did my lessons. During drawing time, instead of going around and looking at their work on a more personal level, I would do a quick go-around.

Erika: Yeah, you’re modeling.

Jeremiah: I would draw; they would kind of, every so often, they’d watch what I was drawing on the screen. I have a whole series of drawings of them, because they’re just, when you look at the drawings, they’re so weird. They ask more questions than they answer in a way.

Erika: But that’s what art history is, it’s documenting moments in time that we will never get back, right, right.

Jeremiah: I have these drawings on the side, so that things like that have happened. When my art dealer’s gallery closed in 2009, Sherry French’s gallery closed; I decided very decisively I wasn’t going to run around and seek new gallery representation immediately. I thought, you know, I’m going to take some time to be a free agent, and little did I know that would continue to last basically till this day. I’m a bit surprised that I’ve been a free agent as long. I do have work in a few galleries; I have a work in a gallery nearby, and I have work in Italy in a gallery, but they’re galleries that are really good to me, and they really respect that I want to do what I want to do, so there’s not this pressure: ‘I need this, you need to make this for the next; don’t feel like a machine. So I’m picking and choosing for churches and doing sacred works, and I’ve been hired to renovate and redesign whole church interiors, and design gigantic panel paintings for a church in Chicopee, Massachusetts. I was essentially the foreperson for all the interior design and architecture, not the architecture, but the interior design choices for the decorative work inside of the Newman Center Chapel at UMass Amherst. Now I’m talking with St. Thomas Church in West Hartford, not far from the school, and they’re basically hiring me to come in and consult on the whole renovation of the interior, changing the whole decorative scheme. So if the contract with St. Thomas is written, as I expected, it would be, that’ll be the fourth church that I’ve made artworks for and renovated. I never saw that coming, but when the opportunity popped up in 2015, I was a free agent, so I didn’t have to ask an art dealer permission to go and work with this church nearby that needed a redo and a renovation and they needed a complete re-overhaul of the interior. So, yeah. They hired a company to do the work, which involved the painting, the industrial-level painting, and then I made artworks for the design. I was the person kind of in charge of the design, as well, but they followed my lead, and I would go in and say, ‘yeah, no, that color isn’t right.’ So that started in 2015, and then it just, I don’t know, I’ve gained a bit of a reputation, I guess, and so that every so often a church will contact me and say, ‘can you help us? We need somebody to consult with.’

Erika: It seems like a lot of influences from your travels to Italy have kind of flowed.

Jeremiah: That’s what I lean on, absolutely. I lean on that. I’ve been really blessed to see a lot of places of worship and a lot of the old ones and the famous ones. So I have, like, this catalog, this visual catalog of what’s possible. And I think currently, it’s interesting, currently I’m being asked because a lot of these churches want something that has more of a style that has roots. It’s an interesting dynamic so I’m going to ride the wave as long as it goes and see where it leads. It’s led to some incredibly interesting projects recently, yeah, where I’ve been I felt like I was really impacting in a different way. It’s a very interesting experience, just the other day I had to go to a funeral for somebody that I knew. In the church where my painting hangs above the main altar and it’s a crucifix painting and in the christian faith that’s like that’s like the number one thing yeah right? There it is above right this person’s remains and the family is looking to that image for comfort and I was like and I made it. Yeah, it’s kind of a weird thing.

Erika: It’s almost poetic in the way that your traditional style has come full circle.

Jeremiah: Yes, yeah, it’s very full circle. I don’t know if you know this, but I’m a pretty faithful person and one of my mottos is that you know God will lead me to what he wants me to do. So there was a reason my dealer closed her down at the time I was very upset about it and then for some reason.

I just... I go with those instincts but for some reason, my instincts were, ‘Don’t go’ and get another gallery, there were galleries that wanted my work, and I just... I told them no. I don’t know why I told them no, but I did. Suddenly, this happens and I say to myself, ‘Okay, now I get it. You needed me to be a free agent. You needed me to be available for this, that’s how I continue to try to roll like okay, that’s what God had planned for you.

Erika: Yeah. How do you cultivate and help your students tap into their subconscious or understanding?

Jeremiah: Yeah, tapping into the subconscious is the trickier thing than conscious. I’ve always felt that we’re training artists that have to be skilled physically and they also have to be emotionally artists they have to be spiritually artists. That’s the tougher one of the two because we can crank up the skills, I can have them mixing colors like a wizard yeah you know we can teach these things if you’re taught if they’re taught properly.

Erika: I remember the grid painting that we had to do.

Jeremiah: Yeah, in that course we just did. I just finished that one and then we just finished the project where you had to paint the magazine art back in, yeah. I’m still doing those projects and the students, literally every one of the 18 students has a piece where you can’t see that it’s been cut out. I had faculty come by and go, ‘How do you get to this point?’ I said, ‘Well, I’d be happy to lay out what I do in the classroom.’ It’s a very systematic approach to understanding that color is all about how one reacts to the other and it’s never subtractive, it’s always additive. You can’t take a color out of a color, you have to add to it, you have to add to it to change it. You know the lessons you were in that class, it’s one after another, they’re very systematically designed and then you have an outcome. But isn’t that how we teach somebody to play a violin? Right, there’s a systematic approach: you start with one finger on one string and then you keep going, and eventually if somebody follows those lessons, you have to have the little fingers and remind yourself that that’s what it feels like to go all out, a little bit of a gift. I mean, I can; run across a few people that do all the lessons exactly as they’re written, they still can’t do the color stuff but there’s those rare people most people have some sort of skill in that regard. It’s the other piece, the subconscious, and that’s where the subconscious and the spirit is where the creative person lives, if you know what I mean?

Erika: Yeah.

Jeremiah: So how to tap into that, one of the things I encourage is just a lot of drawing, and drawing of nature, and being with yourself, being with your subject.

“I encourage my students, I ask them on the first day to embrace their inner child, to resist the world that they just jumped into college, that expects them to be adults. Start adulting and I say, ‘No’, I want you to just be a kid, I want you to be that kid that is excited about the first time they see red paint being put on something-you know. So in doing that, why am I asking for that? Because I want my students to have conversations with their subjects, you know.”

You see this in your children; they’ll have a whole play day with a box, yeah right! But we’re adults when we start, and we’re taught not to have a play day with a box. Why do we do that? All we’re doing is stifling the creative mind. So there’s no problem with developing the logical model; math problems are excellent to do because it develops the logical mind but it’s also okay to to have completely fictitious conversations.

Erika: I love the inner monologue like for me. I think the inner monologue is interesting. It’s something for each person that I see, I think you know I’d love to hear what your thoughts are. People communicate differently, they see the world differently. One of my students is on the spectrum, and he from memory drew the other day Bob Ross as a Funko Pop. You know executed it so well, he can execute these things from his mind and put it down on paper and that’s it, he’s done, and then he moves on. What I mean by this is just as the human mind develops differently for each individual, so does the inner monologue, and how we see those people differently, you know if they’re in special education if they’re neurodivergent. They’re seen as these particular kinds of kids right, but they’re so magical. Their world expands farther than we can see, so that’s what I mean by the inner monologue. I think it’s really like the subconscious mind. Tapping into their kind of subconscious mind and seeing where it goes, it’s so interesting to see how each individual person kind of can express that.

Jeremiah: It’s very difficult to make a lesson plan for that. I found, and I’m not sure I even know how, what I do know how to try to do is inspire the spirit of never growing up. Yeah, the students see that in me, I’m an adult when I need to.

Erika: I saw that in our travels when we were in Sicily, your excitement for things, your endless journey to experience new experiences. That’s so impactful for the small group that we were in. During our journey, the whole entire trip was taking a moment, being present, stopping in the middle of a crowd and just drawing on the floor. I carry that to this day. I like to say I create memories in time like I capture memories in time. That’s where my artwork is at this point where I’m present.

Jeremiah: What you’re saying; the whole invention of the Sicilian program was for that, so that those are the kind of things I try to embrace and do because, and I said this openly to people: the point of going on that is not to learn how to; they need the confidence of having eaten a squid and living to tell them about it. Only doing it because they never had before. You know, and I’ve said this to people, just part of that whole course was designed for the experience that it would bring. I think that is maybe the lesson plan we can lean on to teach this, that subconscious thing you’re talking about. I refer to it as the spirit and the subconscious, you know, the spirit.

Erika: Yeah.

Jeremiah: Everybody has an artistic spirit. We are taught, we are really taught by society how to, how to close it down. To the point I had conversations with people that were doctors for ADHD and things of that nature. And I was telling them that I thought that if, if we crank back in time 50 years, these would be kids that would just be identified as creative. You know?

Erika: Yeah.

Jeremiah: So an example. Yesterday, in our critique, it’s the first, so it’s the course you took as a first-year student, the courses where we went through the whole color lessons and the self-portrait with all the pixels. Then at the end of the semester, you make your own work the way you want to make it, using the knowledge that you have gained. And so that yesterday was the first of those assignments to come in. You’re going to stand up in front of the classroom. I will write down three talking points. I want them to talk about the, the, the prompt of the project. They’re prompted by picking a playing card. So, you pick a playing card from a deck. You have to make a piece of art somehow related to whatever that is. So you can study numerology and symbolism. You can study whatever you want about that card. Something has to somehow create a painting. I had a girl, she had the Four of Hearts. So, she did a painting called ‘The Four of the Four.’ And it was a painting of Wendy’s. It was a painting of a Wendy’s fast food meal. It was because it was four, for $4, the heart was related to the red color. So she had ideas of how it all connected, which was great. It’s all I care about. The first five minutes are you going to stand in front of the classroom and professionally present your work. First of all, what card did you choose? Second of all, what was your research and where did it lead? And third of all, what was your creative process? Okay, what do you want to watch? What is it? A harp on professionalism, et cetera. Then as an assessment. I’m listening. I count the ums that they say and the likes that they say. In other words, I ask them to be very professional with their presentation. I point out places where they don’t speak loud enough for the whole classroom to hear, where they don’t stand straight if they fidget. I’m telling you at the end of their presentation, okay, you said 15 ums and you said.. ‘and, of course the first one to go is like, ‘everybody was trepidation oh my god, I can’t believe I say this so many times. I give them lessons that I learned when I was acting about how to project your voice and how to stand with confidence, and at the end, I say, ‘look, this is my moment of telling you it’s time to turn on the adult switch right when you’re in front of a crowd of people that are you eager to hear about your art, you cannot sound like a dumbass, okay? There’s a point in time where you have to kind of hone in on those skills as a professional artist. ‘You created this art, it’s beautiful but how are you going to explain it to the consultant or the buyer or the person who’s interested in just investing in you? You’ve seen moments like that, the most brilliant work of art and the person comes up and is asked to speak about it and it’s like you know I can’t right they can’t explain or articulate why they created what they created.

Erika: My last question is a metaphorical conceptual question. It’s kind of fun and I thought that you would really like it. If you were a watercolor technique, what technique would you be?

Jeremiah: Oh wow, that’s a good question.

Erika: I know, I thought that you would enjoy it.

Jeremiah: Watercolor technique, which one would I be? I guess I would simply be the one that’s used, I would want to be the one that’s used the most often. Which is, I think, you know, I’ve come out with in my teaching now the seven essential watercolor techniques. There’s actually a YouTube out on it, people watch it and this is one of the reasons I was asked to come down to Texas for the symposium to do a demonstration. I was kind of overwhelmed. It was at the end they came up to the table and wanted me to sign stuff. It was so weird but it’s because they’ve followed my seven essential techniques. So it’s just laying a blend of a wash as the first technique. I think I’d want to be the one that if you couldn’t master it, like getting started. I always fall in love with it more once it has started and I’m kind of into it. It’s when that white page is staring at you and you have to start. I’ve never gotten over it. I don’t know if it’s fear but I just want to get into the thing. I wish that I had little elves at night that would come down and start the painting, and then I could just join it.

Erika: Your mind’s eye sees, as an artist, you see, you see the finished product; but you don’t see the process. So, I think that’s what, as artists, we need to explore more-it’s like the idea of the whole process being a part of the piece rather than the finished product being what we strive for. It’s the exploration of ourselves throughout the piece and throughout the process of creating the product.

Jeremiah: Yeah, so for me, the start is is just sort of more flat; I want to get into the place where I’m starting to really see the form turn and develop and Become dimensional, visually dimensional and aesthetically textural, and that’s the part that I like the most because it’s when it’s when the flat piece of paper suddenly pops, that illusion where it’s not flat anymore, right? But you have to get there, and I know the steps I have to take to get there. So but I think I will still want to be that technique which would be the the one that just got everything started and uh and and didn’t necessarily be the one that hadn’t had the artist had all the fun with yeah it’s the energetic jump start to the piece, yeah that’s cool, it’s a great question if I was...

I guess I have to tap into my inner child, let me really think about being a watercolor technique for a day.