What a Semester Does to My Studio Practice

Every semester changes my studio practice whether I want it to or not. I usually notice it somewhere around the middle of the term when the pace of everything starts accelerating at the same time when projects are in full swing, grading starts stacking up, student emails increase, and class prep becomes more complicated because everyone is at a different point in the process. Some students are stuck, some are behind, and some suddenly find a direction they are excited about and want help developing further. A lot of teaching art and design involves constant problem solving, and by that point in the semester my brain is usually moving in ten directions at once.

By the time I walk into the studio, I can feel the difference immediately.

The work gets smaller during the semester. I start reaching for smaller surfaces, faster materials, and projects that can survive interruption. I stop planning work sessions that require entire open days because I already know those days probably are not going to happen. Instead, the work happens in pieces like an hour after class or forty minutes before bed. And bonus if I can get a little extra time on a weekend. I do not think I fully understood how much teaching uses the same creative energy as making until I had been balancing both for years.

From the outside, teaching art and design looks endlessly creative, and in many ways it is. You are constantly analyzing visual decisions, helping students develop ideas, troubleshooting technical problems, explaining concepts multiple ways, and trying to help someone push their work further. A huge part of teaching is paying close attention. You are looking carefully all day long, and that kind of attention takes energy.

There are days where I get into the studio after teaching and realize I have already spent most of my decision making energy helping other people through their work. Then I sit down in front of my own work and even simple choices feel harder than they should. Colors feel harder. Composition feels harder. Starting feels harder, and for a long time, I thought this meant I was doing something wrong. I thought I was failing at balance somehow. Now I think it is simply the reality of trying to maintain both practices seriously at the same time.

The semester also changes the pace of how I work. During breaks or summer, I tend to spend more time exploring ideas before deciding what they are. I experiment more. I leave things unresolved longer. I follow side paths just to see where they go. During the semester, my studio time becomes more structured because it has to fit around everything else already competing for my attention.

I notice this especially in the materials I reach for. During heavier teaching periods, I tend to gravitate toward processes I already understand well. That is not because I suddenly lose interest in experimentation. Experimentation requires mental space, and if my brain is already overloaded with deadlines, meetings, critiques, and course prep, I am less likely to willingly choose materials that create even more uncertainty.

I think artists who teach sometimes feel uncomfortable admitting that. There is an expectation that being surrounded by creativity all day should constantly feed your own work. Sometimes it does. A student question will stay with me for hours and eventually connect itself to something happening in my own studio practice. A critique conversation will suddenly unlock a problem I had been stuck on in my own work. Watching students experiment often reminds me how quickly fear and overthinking settle into creative practice over time.

At the same time, teaching can absolutely drain the exact energy you would normally bring into the studio. Both realities exist together and over the years, I have also had to change my understanding of what counts as a “real” studio practice.

Earlier in my career, I imagined studio practice as long uninterrupted days where all you did was make work. I thought serious artists worked in huge stretches of focused time with complete immersion in the process. That version of creative life exists sometimes, but most artists I know are building work in the middle of regular life. Between jobs, teaching, errands, exhaustion, and everything else adulthood quietly fills your schedule with, a lot of art gets made in fragments. Once I accepted that, I stopped waiting for ideal conditions before allowing myself to work.

That realization has mattered a lot this year with the 100 day project I have been doing. The work fits into the reality of my schedule right now. The pieces are small enough that I can stay connected to the studio even during busy teaching weeks. I can work on one after class without needing an entire day cleared in advance. The structure of the project works with my life instead of fighting against it.

I also think the project itself reflects the semester more than I realized at first. The layering, interruptions, cutting apart, and rebuilding all feel connected to how fragmented my attention becomes during the semester. Using older unused work as material instead of treating it as untouchable also feels tied to that mindset. The work absorbs whatever life around it happens to be doing.

The hardest part for me is usually not the lack of time. It is the constant switching between roles. Teaching requires you to stay outwardly responsive all day long. Studio work often asks for the opposite. It asks you to slow down enough to figure out what you actually think before turning it into something visual. And that transition can take time.

I think this is also why semesters distort your sense of time so much. You stop thinking in months and start thinking in deadlines. Midterms, critiques, final projects, grading windows, and meetings become the structure surrounding everything else. Eventually your creative rhythm starts adapting around institutional pacing whether you intend it to or not.

I do not necessarily see this as a bad thing anymore. I spent years feeling frustrated that my studio practice changed during teaching semesters, as if consistency meant the work should always function the same way no matter what was happening in my life. At this point, I think a living practice is supposed to respond to your circumstances. Your energy changes. Your attention changes. Your responsibilities change. The work changes with it. The important part is staying connected to the work somehow.

That connection does not always look impressive from the outside. Sometimes it means finishing pieces. Sometimes it means sketching ideas before class starts. Sometimes it means reorganizing the studio because you have not had the energy to work in it properly for weeks. Sometimes it means collecting references and thinking deeply even if nothing visible gets produced yet.

I think artists are often much harsher with themselves about this than they need to be. Productivity is not the only proof that a creative practice still exists. Thinking is part of the work. Looking is part of the work. Sitting with ideas before you fully understand them is part of the work too. The semester changes my studio practice every single time. The pace changes, the structure changes, and the scale changes. But the work itself does not disappear. It just becomes something different for a while.