Mr. Barthelmess is entering his 24th year of teaching art at all levels including pre-K and college. He is entering his 10th year of teaching in NC. Originally from NY, he grew up surrounded by art, culture and some of the most amazing museums in the world. His art education came early as he fondly recalls drawing with his father on a daily basis. He learned early in his life the ability and power to communicate visually which something he encourages his students to seek out in their artwork.
Mr. Barthelmess attended and graduated from Ithaca College with his undergraduate degree in Studio Art. He then attended Syracuse University where he earned his Masters in Science in Art Education.
As an artist Mr. Barthelmess has always been fascinated about the power, complexity and mystery the human form possesses. Mr. Barthelmess has spent his entire art life investigating both the exterior and interior of the form combining and distorting the anatomy of the human form to create both expressive and surreal images.
As a teacher, Mr. Barthelmess wants his students to work hard, produce art but feel safe enough to take risks. Art taught correctly treats the subject matter for what it is which is a form of communication with its own rules and grammar, history and philosophy that encompasses every human from everywhere in the world. When taught and explored with this intent, students will learn to think critically and make global connections as well as connections in all of their education – past, present and future.
Mr. Barthelmess is married to former RHS Teacher Mrs. Tara Barthelmess and is the proud father of 4 amazing children, 3 dogs, 2 cats and a turtle.
The Benefits of Art Education In the 21st century world, creative, analytical people are needed to succeed in the workforce. Regardless of occupation, art provides students with these skills. From learning skills and history to philosophizing why decisions were made, then applying this information to their own work and then to critiquing and breaking down art both made by themselves and others, students learn skills irreplaceable to the work force. Art education creates confident, creative decisive diverse cultural people ready to achieve and prosper in our modern society.
1. The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships. Unlike much of the curriculum in which correct answers and rules prevail, in the arts, it is judgment rather than rules that prevail.
2. The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.
3. The arts celebrate multiple perspectives. One of their large lessons is that there are many ways to see and interpret the world.
4. The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving purposes are seldom fixed, but change with circumstance and opportunity. Learning in the arts requires the ability and a willingness to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.
5. The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know. The limits of our language do not define the limits of our cognition.
6. The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects. The arts traffic in subtleties.
7. The arts teach students to think through and within a material. All art forms employ some means through which images become real.
8. The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said. When children are invited to disclose what a work of art helps them feel, they must reach into their poetic capacities to find the words that will do the job.
9. The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.
10. The arts' position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.
SOURCE: Eisner, E. (2002). The Arts and the Creation of Mind, In Chapter 4, What the Arts Teach and How It Shows. (pp. 70-92). Yale University Press. Available from NAEA Publications. NAEA grants reprint permission for this excerpt from Ten Lessons with proper acknowledgment of its source and NAEA.