Eleanor H. Erskine, Associate Professor
Printmaking
erskinee@pdx.edu

Teaching Philosophy
My goal in teaching is to develop a healthy and effective visual and verbal dialogue with students at all levels about the creative experience. In the processes of arriving at their own works, they are encouraged to be directly responsive to personal vision, understanding themselves and their work through confronting their individual desires, concepts, and viewpoints. This process is intended not only to build a visual dialogue but also can be related metaphorically to "journey." It is a means to be responsive to the many methods introduced for the search and exploration required during the expansion of one's ideas. This discourse is further activated by studying historical and contemporary implications of artists work, acknowledging current issues, implementing critical thinking and analysis as a path that is necessary and parallel to the creative expedition.

Artist Statement
As an Artist my desire to touch is to evoke meaning, memory, and to stimulate thought. My effort in "seeing" is with intent to scan, receive, and understand perceptual information. To hear is to listen and absorb, to taste is to describe, to smell is to close ones eyes. To have vision is to live before the mind's eye, to see beyond oneself, to experience with the idea of gaining insight, to own the apparatus for seeing through "things."

Human beings have a driving desire to collect "things." This gathering helps us to order and communicate thought, actively defining us, thus articulating the unique description and physicality of who, what, and where we are. In our society of materialistic values, in which status and hierarchical ranking are signaled by ownership of objects and "things," the artist has the opportunity to subvert such ownership in the reallocation of "things" to add to by questioning the culture at large.

Artists, as cultural recorders and analysts of current events, must continue to help people to be inspired through being cognizant and sensitive to what happens around them. The intentional turning of the eye toward a greater realm, along with having and by emphasizing sensitivity to one's immediate surroundings, artists such as myself support this basic desire for even greater genuine understanding.

In consciously conveying thought, actively perceiving, contemplating and creating work, I attempt to relate my individual vision to cultural context. Such practice informs in ways that make the culture rethink and better comprehend the influences of its hierarchies and values.

The visual work itself intends then to reveal the feelings of an epoch, offering a chance for the individual artist to relate one's experience to another's individual vision.