Her Story
About Callan
I've been working in art education for about 6 years now, and the school I'm at currently focuses on students with various learning disabilities and special needs. We have a lot of students with autism, ADHD, and other diagnoses, and I work with them to teach them the basics of art and give them more of a creative outlet. I always knew that I wanted to go into art, but the art education part was more of a process. COVID hit right when I was graduating from my undergraduate program with a Bachelor's of Fine Arts, and I decided to stick around for a master's degree in fine arts because I didn't want to be traveling out of state in the middle of chaos. During that time, I'm a Christian, and I felt like God was working on my heart to tell me I was going to end up teaching. As soon as I showed up for my first semester of my graduate program, I got an email from a former professor saying his wife had this little school and she needed an art teacher. I started teaching part-time during my graduate studies, and when I graduated, I went into full-time art teaching with middle school and high school students. I'm an artist as well as a teacher, and I continue to hone my artistic practice. I do primarily drawing and painting, focusing mostly on people and landscapes and the intersection of those. My style is very realistic, but you can still tell that it's paint - you can see the brush strokes, but from a distance it seems real.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Callan
01What do you attribute your success to?
I think it's a combination of things. Obviously, I work hard, and I have a high commitment to excellence. I want to just, wherever I am, I want to do my job really well. And I think that's a skill I learned from honestly, just my art, because you have to pay so much attention to detail, and you have to decide when is it good enough, when is it done? And my answer is usually, not yet. But also, I just believe in God's provision, and I've seen His hand at work in my life in a lot of different ways. I know that I didn't deserve to get into the college I got into. Like, that was a gift that I was able to afford it. I know that I don't have the networking prowess yet to be able to have found the job that I found most recently, and that kind of came to me in a pretty Divine Way. So yeah, I believe God's provision and hard work.
02What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I would say you need some kind of anchor in your life. You need to know what truth is, and where it comes from. And you need to know who you are. You need to have a strong identity and a good support system. And then, you know, once you know those things, you kind of can't go wrong.
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