I teach the way I learned: by building. The classroom I believe in is a bottega — the Renaissance workshop where apprentices learned by making real work, with real stakes, beside someone further down the road. Theory matters, and I teach it, but theory in a bottega is load-bearing. It holds up something the student is actually constructing.
My subject is the working artist’s whole life: the craft and the commerce, the spirit and the spreadsheet, treated as one practice rather than opposites in negotiation. Most art education trains students for a market that no longer exists and leaves them defenseless before the one that does. I teach the market that exists — and the larger argument that this is the best time in five centuries to be an artist, for those prepared to work like it.
Students leave my courses with finished artifacts: completed canvases, launched projects, claims staked.