As Educational Director of TDS, I receive several unsolicited inquiries a month from people interested “in a position teaching an art class for your school,” as one letter began. And indeed, as enrollments in our studio program grow, I often scan the horizons for potential instructors.

But I have a hunch that the kind of artists I’m looking for will have informed themselves enough about TDS to know that we are not a school, nor are we offering anyone a teaching “job” since few as yet make a full living teaching at TDS. What we do offer is something maybe more valuable, that is, a studio learning environment that allows the authentic teaching artist to emerge.

What do I mean by a teaching artist? I can’t speak for other areas of study, but I do know that the best teachers of studio art, in my experience, have a rare and Janus-like personality that can face in two directions at once. One face is the artist, immersed in her own art practice, having all the fire and personal passion that is at the heart of creative work. This aspect of the artist is the one that provides the working model from which students can measure their own seriousness of effort.

The other aspect is that of the art teacher. And I find that the artist who can share his studio practices with others as an element of his own art practice to be very rare. I speak from long experience when I say that in today’s art schools it can be very confusing for a new student who is looking to connect with a teaching artist. It is a barely concealed fact that many artists who are teaching would happily give up teaching if they could afford it, and as a result they give off mixed messages about their commitment to their students’ learning needs.

An artist may be willing to teach responsibly but still must navigate some complicated compromises awaiting her in the art school systems of our time. Secure art teaching jobs are often scarce, and it can require political skills to both get a job and keep one, enshrouded as such employment can be in academic, administrative, and social obligations that have nothing to do with the core relationship between teacher and student. In addition, even an effective teaching artist can become polarized between the historically rigid schedule of contractual year-long teaching and the needs of her own studio practice, especially in preserving those periods of solitary concentration that every artist needs.

Against this background, I believe that one of my most important roles at The Drawing Studio has been to seek, identify, enroll, support, and inspire that rare creature, the teaching artist. And in concert with our present staff of great teaching artists my second and equally important task is to maintain TDS as a serious and user-friendly art learning center, where people are free to come and stay, study and practice, or go and return, as life allows.

Transforming the art learning climate at TDS begins, however, with reorienting the teaching artist. Even the best teaching artists have to confront and crack their own art school mindset in order to become really useful. What is that mindset? It is the unexamined assumption that the art teaching job is to produce specialist art-product makers. Until that assumption is overturned, it will be difficult for the teaching artist to awaken to the opportunity before her, which is to serve those who come to the Drawing Studio in order to develop their visual capacities as a component of their larger life in the world.

How do we encourage that development? A few current ideas include:

• Elimination of the anxiety of competition and grades. Let the teacher and the student set their own pace as needed; let the student repeat courses if interested.

• Flexibility for teachers, allowing them to design their own teaching schedules (with faculty cooperation) to allow time for their own work.

• Flexible course and workshop offerings that is, ones with long and short courses, variable starting dates, and hours better fitted to the lives of those busy people who are our students.

• Offering open studio opportunities for independent practice.

• Creating an environment where teachers and their students can easily arrange tutorials, critiques, outreach opportunities, or spontaneous sessions, as opportunities and needs arise.

• Scheduling monthly faculty meetings to share, learn, and improve what we are doing. A periodic offer of a special seminar for teachers committed to mastering new strategies for studio art instruction, ones better shaped to the many-faceted lives of our students.

• Active promotion and celebration of the work of our teaching artists and their students through exhibitions, publications, and special events.

As an aging artist, I am sometimes prone to melancholic meditations upon the brevity of life and the insubstantiality of individual fame. But as a teaching artist, I am young every day, filled with the abiding satisfaction of sharing the languages of art with new learners.