By way of introductions, my name is Jason Beirens and I have been drawing since I was two years old. I love art, give me a pen and paper and I am a happy man. I grew up at Disneyland, my dad worked there for most of my childhood. So my life has been greatly influenced by cartoon characters and watching the effects that they have on others, young and old. Goofy can melt the heart of the most hardcore goth. And no I will not describe the scene here, I want your imaginations to put it together.
As for what art means to me, it means I can't go an hour without doodling, or thinking about lines and how they should fit together and having them flow together to create depth, breadth and scope. How a line drawn just right can be a world. I honestly love to draw a few random shapes, leave them for a while and then come back ad see what they become after they have percolated on the page. I love that a drawing doesn't have to be what you expected, it can change course and become something else. When art works it just works, and when it doesn't you can still learn from it.
Why an art teacher, mostly because in one single day 3 people independent of each other said: "Why don't you become a teacher?" So here I am. It feels right, graphic design work, web design, law clerk, they all didn't fit, though I am still doing all three, teaching though it seems to work. It seems right. Things are clicking into place.
Literacy means a lot of things to me, you can be literate but not understand what you have read. You need to be literate in many different areas in order to gain a full understanding, to have all the possibilities open. To be literate means to in a very general, but real sense is to have an open mind and to take in knowledge ad nauseum. Whatever is available soak it in, and learn. To be literate is to learn and learn and learn, learn to understand, learn to think, learn to accept the possibility that you are wrong and with new knowledge one day you may be right, though don't hold your breath.
Art needs knowledge from multiple content areas to be worth anything. Art is context, context is knowledge and for knowledge to exist you need to be literate. Literacy is extremely important to art. Artists need to be smart in order to make art worth observing.
