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For Wendy Morgan, teaching art means more than helping students find their creative side.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cOur ultimate goal is teaching kids resilience,\u201d Morgan told CBC Radio’s Weekend AM. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhen 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
That ability to persevere through adversity is something she put into practice, first hand, recently.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cMonths of work just washed away days before the grand opening,\u201d Morgan said. \u201cI know it’s a gut punch, truly, but once the initial shock wore off I had to look at it in a new way.\u2026 I could not fold at the first major obstacle.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Learning from failure<\/p>\n
Morgan said her hope is that she can help the next generation \u201cbecome unafraid to try, unafraid to create and unafraid to share their artistic voice with confidence\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cA 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,\u201d Morgan said. \u201cAnd when a line strays, the disappointment is real and it’s a private moment.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Morgan Art Academy owner Wendy Morgan is seen here cleaning flood damage recently at her Grand Falls-Windsor location. (Submitted photo)<\/p>\n
She said that unlike sports or academics, where pressure comes from a referee, team mates or test scores, the struggle in art is internal.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Her teaching method involves encouragement and problem solving instead of criticism.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s a really special place to practise this healthy friction and to have safe failure,\u201d she said. \u201cSo nobody in our studio is telling the child that their drawing isn’t good enough.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have the four Fs of artistic triage,\u201d Morgan said. \u201cWhen 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 \u2018finish it,\u2019 because I saw this quote the other day that said one of the most important things that we can learn is how to continue.\u201d<\/p>\n
The other elements in her \u201cFour Fs\u201d are fixing the mistake, flipping it to be something different and featuring it \u2014 making the mistake a focal point of the work.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI know that doing something will get me somewhere,\u201d she said. \u201cIt might not get me where I expected it to go, but I will be further ahead than I was.\u201d<\/p>\n
Download our\u00a0free CBC News app<\/a>\u00a0to sign up for push alerts for CBC Newfoundland and Labrador. Click\u00a0here to visit our landing page<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Listen to this article Estimated 4 minutes The audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":629222,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[442,498,499,500,501,156,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-629221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=629221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/629221\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/629222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=629221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=629221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=629221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}