Our Philosophy
Studio Connections provides exceptional training in visual and performing arts, inspiring personal voice, developing leadership and fostering community involvement.
- The studio will be an emotionally and physically safe, organized place where students can have FUN!
- Students will acquire new skills and knowledge through clear, sequential lessons that will connect previously learned skills to new ones.
- Students will have opportunities to extend and refine knowledge through enjoyable comparing, classifying, abstracting, and analyzing processes.
- Students will engage in meaningful artistic processes with many opportunities for individual decision-making, problem solving, experimentation, and invention.
- Students will continue to develop the life-long good habits of critical thinking, creative thinking, and self-regulated thinking.
Drama – Robert Encila
As a teacher, I have the unique privilege to observe many children at play. I’m also a smitten father of a nine year-old girl, whose unabashed spontaneity is a clear signal of creativity in action. Children are known for their universal facility to make believe, allowing them heightened focus and inspired well-being. Play is essential to creativity and a fundamental premise for meaningful learning.
When it comes to acting before an audience, it seems most adults require permission to risk the proverbial comfort zone. I contend that as social creatures we are vastly skilled actors. But we tend to refine our repertoire in the shadow, often unaware of the motives that drive our actions. Ironically enough, the very effort to suppress risk-taking through conscious dialogue reveals a highly sophisticated acting strategy.
As children we act blissfully in the light as a function of play. As we mature, we tend to act wisely in order to preserve and survive. This beautiful paradox we call acting is the emphasis of my work as a teacher. It is the catharsis that sheds light on the inquisitive soul.
The study of drama and theatre provides a constructive tool for examining our performance with or without an official audience. In this community of creative participants, we address the collective issue of what makes people tick. We accept our space as a sacred container for investigating our choices, risking transparency and feedback. In other words, we employ the consistent practice of evaluating subtext, inspiring honesty so we might empathize more fully with those who share our world.
Visual Art – Ginny Encila
Art and the artistic process represent a vital part of intelligence. Art is a universal aspect of humanity even where no language exists to define it. Though the basic elements of line, space, shape, color, texture, value, and form continue to be organized by the principles of contrast, emphasis, balance, unity, pattern, rhythm, and movement, these can be used in ever changing variety.
Studio Connections is dedicated to providing an excellent varied visual art education, based on individual student need and interest. The elements and principles of art are tools to give full voice to the artist’s unique vision. Artists who have created before us provide insight and inspiration for the learning process. Students of all ages have their own story. The Studio provides a place for artists to create and learn to make their intentions heard.
