About the artist
Call me Al
I'm a fluffy-haired, Eastern Washington-based visual artist with experience and interest ranging from multimedia painting and drawing to theatrical set design and installation work. Fundamentally, I believe that all art is play: when we create, we use concepts and materials to communicate our daydreams out loud. It's my mission as an artist to keep my feet as firmly on the ground as my head is freely floating in the clouds!
Jump to:
Self-portraits
What"s the artwork about?
color and texture of raw wood, glass, and canvas
transitory spaces in both our inner and outer worlds
the reflection and refraction of light
metaphorical meanings in ordinary objects and events
play, play, play!
zooming into the little
sensory experiences we
tune out in our daily lives
allowing full-scale works to retain the easy, unpolished confidence of a sketchbook page
creating space for interpretation by obscuring meaning
ensuring every layer is seen, showing how I carve new images from old ones
simple, bright, playful colors given depth through texture
uncertainty in self-concept
simple, childlike perspective on the sensory world
Why teach?
Four years of experience in education and childcare made it clear to me that the way we teach art is all wrong.
Kids are given coloring sheets, walked through craft projects step-by-step, and asked "what's that supposed to be?" when sharing their drawings with others. They're taught art history through the Old Greats with impeccable techniques who were either commissioned to paint murals in chapels or ignored during their time and died without recognition. Then they grow into adults who tell me that artistic skills are simply talents you either are born with or aren't. They don't "understand" abstract art and they don't believe themselves to be creative people. It breaks my heart to see such a fundamental and pervasive misunderstanding of creativity and the arts, especially when the solution is so simple.
Art has a different definition and serves a different purpose for everyone. My job as an instructor is to coax you into discovering what art is to you. I provide materials, you get to play with them. Play is our brains' favorite way of learning. Nothing in the world can substitute experience!
New artists might not know how to play or might need a lot of nurturing and encouragement to feel comfortable playing. Experienced artists benefit from being shown new ways to play.
Art vs Artist
Self-portraits
Al's Story
I'm autistic. There's no inherent good or bad to being autistic or to autistic life, but there's a lot about the experience that can set a kid back: sensory differences, communication difficulties, caregivers and teachers who don't understand, incongruent internal and external identity.
Everyone has a gap between their internal and external worlds that we learn to bridge through communication, but to an autistic person this gap can be a wide chasm or an impenetrable wall. Sometimes, even if we learn to communicate in whichever way works best for us, we don't understand our internal worlds well enough to express our experiences. This describes me: an autistic person who-- even with support-- often doesn't know what he's thinking or feeling, what he needs or what he doesn't. As an autistic kid, I was dealing with a wave of internal, unidentifiable pressure when I had my first breakthrough as an artist.
One day, I took a step back from my high school art homework and realized for the first time that every piece I'd made was communicating emotions I hadn't realized I'd been feeling. I could look closely and identify themes I resonated with, then turn the page around to a friend or a family member who would identify the same themes themselves. Everything suddenly clicked into place:
the only thing I needed to bridge the gap was a page.
As an adult, I'm more skilled at traditional communication than ever before. I'm confident when writing, interacting with strangers, and leading classrooms... but artwork is still my preferred method of bridging the gap.
My mission as an artist is twofold: I want to communicate with others and with myself. I want to show others the way I process the world and I want to understand why I process the world the way I do. I want to build a bridge both to bring my internal world to the outside and to invite the outside world in.