“It was 1995. I was in my junior year at art school, embedded in the ceramic and sculpture departments. At the time I was working with a wide variety of rocks from a river that ran through campus, and setting up a 'field' of rock sculptures in a small area in between the main building and the ceramics building. These sculptures stood no taller than three to four feet high and in any given moment there were between twelve and fifteen of them in a grid pattern. I had signed up for a critique with visiting artist Anthony Caro. He did enjoy what I was doing, and we had a nice conversation. Then he looked around at where I was and suggested that I could use larger rocks and more of the lawn. Just as we were done, and he was walking away, he said, 'Stop playing croquet on a football field.' At the time I really didn’t understand what he was trying to convey, and what’s worse I didn’t appreciate it because of that.

Flash forward a decade. After taking a ten-week personal development course, I realized I was out of integrity with myself and not happy in the life I was living. So I resigned from my teaching job at a magnet school and applied to the studio resident program at the art school. I knew I had to get back into doing what I loved. I started working again making pots and firing wood kilns, etc. but my work was going nowhere. It was stagnant. So I started making what my professors called “pot sized sculpture.” I had been told not to use the wheel any longer. I had to make work in a whole new way and I had no idea what this was. Thinking about this statement from Anthony Caro, as my new world was unfolding, was eating away at me. It took ten years, but I finally got it.

I got that I was living life in a small way. I wasn’t taking any chances, not in my life or in my art. I was playing a really safe game.

It was then that I decided to remove the training wheels. I started making a whole new body of work - a body of work that has me living my dream, today, in graduate school. Though it took another seven years to get here, I’m now playing that game of croquet, and on the field that it was intended for.

I have that statement – 'Stop playing croquet on a football field' - on my studio door. I read it every single day, and have even put it up on the board in the classroom where I teach on occasion.”

Aaron Flynn is a sculptor and grad student at University of North Texas. His ceramic work can be seen HERE.

"One day during a printmaking class my professor came to do his rounds. His style of teaching was allowing us to work on our own, and he went from student to student to see where we were at in our process. I was having a really challenging time in my personal life and started to cry when he asked me how my etching was going. (Now that I think of it, I'm not sure if I actually cried, but I know I shared with him my crazed emotional state.) What I said is a bit blurry, as it was over 20 years ago, but I'm sure it was infused with a lot of drama. He responded in such a sweet calm, but stable voice, 'Take all of that emotion that you are feeling and put it into your work.'

It was like all of the walls came crashing down in that moment and I finally felt free - free to express myself fully in my artwork, free to put it all out there onto the paper in all of its messy goodness. It was the permission I had been needing my whole life to let my feelings out there and to stop stuffing the scary ones deeper down into the festering well.

I can still smell the inks, the textured table from all of the wiped plates, hear the music someone was playing in their print shop studio, see the light filtering into the room from the windows high up.

After that experience I went totally 'Frida Kahlo' with my assignments in both my illustration and fine art classes. Years later, and after some therapy (mostly art therapy), I still recall that moment as the birth of the real artist within, an unleashing of sorts... and am ever so grateful to him for being the catalyst for that. Thank you Jim Lee, you are forever one of my heroes."

Jennifer Mazzucco is a devotional painter deeply inspired by Indian and Tibetan art. After teaching middle school art at a private school in Connecticut for 9 years, she took a leap of faith to open a collaborative arts and healing space on the west coast called PRASADA. Check out her beautiful artwork and books at JenniferMazzucco.com.

"Art school. 1993. I'm taking a class with a visiting artist named Michael Singer, a mild-mannered, thoughtful - and highly acclaimed - sculptor who would say things like, 'You don't have to move to New York after you graduate. You can make your art - and make it well - from anywhere.' The class was staring at a project I'd put up for critique. It was a wall piece with fabric wrapped around the stretcher bars, and various smaller bits of fabric stitched on top. At the time my work was very sociopolitical in nature, so I'm sure it had some point of outrage anchoring the subject matter. Probably I considered it a 'quilt painting,' though I really can't remember the details. What I do remember is Michael staring at the work for a long while then simply getting up and turning it over, exposing all the frayed fabric ends and scores of stringy bits dangling off the back.

Then he looked at me and said, 'This. This is what you were trying to say.'

In that moment, I fully understood the true meaning of materials. My piece was not about whatever literal thing I was attempting to crudely convey with color and fabric. What Michael taught me in that moment was how to get beneath the message and into the soul of a work of art. What I was trying to say had everything to do with connection, the stitching together of disparate parts, and there was no better way to convey that than to turn the painting over.

I think of this when I get stuck in my work, writing, fine art or otherwise. And, when I feel I'm not quite getting it right, I imagine turning the piece over in my mind to see its skeleton, and to find out what truly wants to be revealed."