When an artist retreats, they are moving forward

“To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, light-weight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store.”
— Susan Sontag On Photography, 1980

It was June of 2013, on one of my last days as Director of Educational Technology at Marin Academy in San Rafael, CA. That day I took this selfie from a tripod to memorialize the moment—and the place.

It was a graduation portrait.

Looking at this image today I am drawn to a number of questions about myself like:

“Why didn’t I follow my dream to be an artist who photographs flowers right then?”
”Was I actually practicing what it takes to create artistic prints of my photographs?”
”What did people think about me when they came to my office?”
”Actually, I made a closet look pretty good, didn’t I?”

I left MA that year after 15 years as their first administrative level Director in charge of implementing technology into the school’s learning program. I had a short stint in a similar position at the San Domenico School in San Anselmo, CA where I helped them continue their student iPad program and teacher learning conferences, before leaving the world of private school administration to become a “Regular Classroom Teacher.”

I started out as a substitute for the San Rafael City Schools and then I taught at the Envision Schools.

In March of 2015, I was hired by SFUSD to replace a teacher for the remainder of the school year at the James Denman Middle School. Denman is a very large public middle school in San Francisco, situated in the City’s most diverse neighborhood, right next to Balboa High School. There were over 800 sixth through eighth graders at the school.

I became the multimedia teacher that year and taught sections of 6th, 7th, and 8th grade multimedia and the Denman TV (DTV archive) Journalism class. I also had an advisory group which would remain the same for all three years of middle school.

Each year I had between 145-155 students until after we came back from the Covid lockdown. In my last year at Denman I had 187 students!

Check out the DTV piece my students created on “artificial intelligence” from April 2023. That was my last year at Denman.

Back in 2015, I was in graduate school full time while teaching. My goal was to earn a California State Social Science Teaching Credential and a Masters in Education. To earn that credential I would need to give up my job as a multimedia teacher in order to do my intern teaching in Social Science.

California started an alternative credential program that allowed schools to hire teachers with an Intern Credential and pay them a small salary. Student teaching programs usually require students to teach full time for at least an entire year in a classroom without pay. At 55 years old, and more than 28 years experience, I earned $45,000 teaching full time as an intern teacher for the San Francisco Unified School District.

But it was a whole lot better than zero.

The Principal wanted me to stay on as the multimedia teacher the next year and support a new one-to-one iPad program provided by Verizon. It was getting pretty late for me in terms of years left to teach in my career and I wanted to teach something else so I said no to that offer and began looking for jobs again.

As luck would have it, one of the two 8th grade Social Science teachers left Denman at the end of the school year and I slipped right into that position. In an amazing twist of fate, another substitute teacher I knew from the Envision Schools came in to take over the multimedia program while I continued to teach the DTV journalism/current events classes each year.

Another important note for those wondering about teacher pay and retention. With a very strong union and teacher pay scale, my salary more than doubled in just a couple of years. Once I earned my certificate and received tenure status, which took only one year, the District gave me 11 years for my 28 years of experience on the pay scale to start. Combined with my graduate school credits while teaching and 19 years on the pay scale, I was at $109,000 in my last year there.

To me that’s a living wage for someone living in San Francisco in 2023. But it could be a lot higher too.

Art was always in my classes. For advisory I had students create self-portraits in the 6th grade using nice 5x7 art paper. I did a drawing with one group of students in their 6th grade. You can see why photography is my art and not drawing.

When I started teaching multimedia classes in March that first year at Denman, I gave students an assignment to write two paragraphs responding to the question:

What is art?

Many of my students reacted by saying “why are you making me write something in art class?” I don’t have copies of their answers anymore but many were excited to be doing art in school, and they were looking forward to learning more. They found it refreshing to actually think about and discuss the idea of art as they see it.

Nobody had ever asked them before.

Some of the work I did with art in my classroom showed up in a story I wrote in December, 2025 and I will share more over time like today.

The point I want to make is simply that this period of time was clearly an important transition for me to go from a tech-based existence in my work to a more human-centered approach focusing on teaching, art, and teaching through art.

This work kept me thinking about the art my students were doing to communicate their ideas and I enjoyed both giving them prompts and opportunities to be artistic. Sharing their work on classroom walls, school hallways, and online through images and videos became a weekly part of my job as a teacher.

I curated walls, social media streams, and school newspapers and yearbooks all year long.

Today, being an artist is my full time job. Whether it be writing stories and sharing images and videos on SubStack, or creating art for shows and submitting to their calls for entry, I am always busy doing one or another of these fun “jobs” I created for myself!

Someone told me artists should take themselves out for day trips to explore art, do art, or just think about art or writing in a different way and from different perspectives. After almost a year and half in my new place I was settled enough that I decided to take a day trip to downtown Sacramento exploring a couple of art galleries.

I took the electric train and it was a bit odd to drive 8 miles to the station in order to make the 20 mile train ride downtown. But it was very smooth and easy to navigate Sacramento’s Light Rail system. The Gold Line travels East-West from Folsom. Next, I’ll try the Blue Line which goes the same way coming out of Roseville.

You can actually take Amtrak downtown as well from Roseville.

I got off in the historic Sacramento arts district right near the Twisted Track Gallery. I had submitted three pieces to a show there and wanted to see the gallery.

I also went to the Verge Center for the Arts to see a show and put out postcards to promote my Blue Line Arts Art at Work show at the Roseville Chamber of Commerce.

I learned the Royal Chicano Air Force show “Mid-Flight” would have helped me teach the story of farm workers in America through the art that was created about the story in those days.

I also learned I’ve been taking myself toward a world of art all my life.

I took the train home and battled the freeway-like street driving to get home. It took as long to drive the 8 miles home from the station as it did to go 20 miles on the train.

That night in the middle of the night my phone went off. It was a notification that I had been accepted to the show at the Twisted Track Gallery.

Now I get to go back there it two weeks with my art!

My oldest daughter Emily would tell me I haven’t been paying attention to what I was manifesting with my own actions. I think I need to listen to her more and take more artist retreats!

You can read more about my teaching with art here.

Thanks for reading today.