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For Wendy Morgan, teaching art means more than helping students find their creative side.
For her, art teaches resilience, problem solving and confidence, and believes learning to handle how to navigate mistakes in a piece of art is one of the most important lessons young artists can learn.
“Our ultimate goal is teaching kids resilience,” Morgan told CBC Radio’s Weekend AM.
“When children execute a new idea and it doesn’t turn out the way they wanted it to, it gives them a low-stakes space to problem solve. They could pivot and they could try again. And in a world where everything comes instantly, learning to embrace those small creative struggles builds a confident and resilient human.”
That ability to persevere through adversity is something she put into practice, first hand, recently.
Just as the new location for Morgan Art Academy was ready to open its doors, a town water main on Main Street in Grand Falls-Windsor ruptured. The resulting flood destroyed months of preparation.
“Months of work just washed away days before the grand opening,” Morgan said. “I know it’s a gut punch, truly, but once the initial shock wore off I had to look at it in a new way.… I could not fold at the first major obstacle.”
She said the community in Grand Falls-Windsor rallied behind them and that support pushed her forward to open the Art Emporium and Morgan Art Studio.
Learning from failure
Morgan said her hope is that she can help the next generation “become unafraid to try, unafraid to create and unafraid to share their artistic voice with confidence”.
She believes that all artists, no matter how young, create internal expectations for themselves. And, she said, these personal challenges are often the hardest part of the creative process.
“A four-year-old, sometimes seven-year-old, will look at their painting or look at their drawing and say it didn’t come out right,” Morgan said. “And when a line strays, the disappointment is real and it’s a private moment.”
Morgan Art Academy owner Wendy Morgan is seen here cleaning flood damage recently at her Grand Falls-Windsor location. (Submitted photo)
She said that unlike sports or academics, where pressure comes from a referee, team mates or test scores, the struggle in art is internal.
Her teaching method involves encouragement and problem solving instead of criticism.
“It’s a really special place to practise this healthy friction and to have safe failure,” she said. “So nobody in our studio is telling the child that their drawing isn’t good enough.”
She hopes some of the lessons young artists learn at her studio can be translated into life skills that can be put to use outside of the art room.
“We have the four Fs of artistic triage,” Morgan said. “When something goes wrong, how do we treat it? How do we handle it? And so one of those Fs, one of my favorite ones, is ‘finish it,’ because I saw this quote the other day that said one of the most important things that we can learn is how to continue.”
The other elements in her “Four Fs” are fixing the mistake, flipping it to be something different and featuring it — making the mistake a focal point of the work.
Morgan, who sold her first piece of art at the age of 10, said art has given her the ability to be unafraid to try new things.
“I know that doing something will get me somewhere,” she said. “It might not get me where I expected it to go, but I will be further ahead than I was.”
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