Even though she never planned to become a teacher, her love for art, love for travel, experience and a positive mind has led Amanda Slaughter to become an art professor at TJC so many students love.
Slaughter’s portrayal of life is an art itself as she has followed a “what was happening next” lifestyle. Her experience has been constructed by traveling to places where her work was needed but also finding a time to enjoy aspects of life. Slaughter’s travel has given her a greater scope to perceive and appreciate art with.
“Work hard, but have fun doing it,” Slaughter said.
While Slaughter attended grad school, as a chair’s assistant at Stephen F. Austin, the computer that held all art images was stolen the year prior to her arrival at the school. She was given the job to rebuild the slide library for SFA which she found fascinating.
“For instance, take a painting that everybody knows like A Starry Night by Van Gogh. If you look at it in this book versus this book they’re going to be, the colors will be different because of the type of paper, the type of ink, how old it is, how well it’s been preserved, what the temperature is,” Slaughter said. “Then you take that same image, find it online or you try to reproduce it online it’s still going to look different. So my job was trying to find the closest to the original color set that I could find. So I was reaching out to libraries all over the country.”
This task was what grew her love for art, knowledge and appreciation for its quality. Slaughter explains how the internet changes art when it is posted as a picture or a digital form that creates a “push and pull” when artists are deciding whether to post their art online.
“It’s just like a person, you see them online, you see their picture, and you meet them, it’s totally different, right? It’s the same thing with art. Because art is created, and it’s a living thing, right. And we all interpret it so differently,” Slaughter explained.
For her, art is a beautiful creation made by different people who see it, interpret it and perceive it differently.
Slaughter implements all of her experience into her classes by giving her students an edge to find a way to stand out, not hold back and manage their time. She encourages them saying, “take that crayon and scribble all over the place. If that’s what you’re feeling in the moment, get it down, get it done. Get all that out.”
She explains art to be made out of emotions and therefore the artist’s headspace has to be in the same space they want the art piece to be in. All the emotions are implemented into the piece, and the final product speaks those emotions.
“Just let the piece speak to you and finish it,” Slaughter said. “And let it just happen organically.”
She mentions how tangible art is used to refill one’s soul when life gets tiring. The tactile aspect of art pieces replenish the soul either by admiring it or creating it.
Slaughter said as humans “we all deplete you know, we only have so much in our cup every day. And in stages of life. And then when that cup gets empty, you gotta go fill it back up.”
Even though her specialty of art are collages, Slaughter also enjoys gardening at her house. She expresses this as a family activity where her children and husband join her to care for her garden at their home.
Her garden is colorful and she compared it to a disco with different sections of flowers, the sun and all the butterflies that make everything so pretty. Her admiration for plants is in account to their growth and the way they spread around.
“There’s something satisfying about walking in your backyard and digging up sweet potatoes for dinner,” Slaughter said.
Slaughter implements her phrase of “work hard, but have fun doing it” with her family because she sees balance as an essential to life. Her family does everything together and always sets time aside for each other.
“At 5p.m., it’s time to turn off work and focus on family, you know, or whatever that time is,” Slaughter said.
Her family was an opportunity for Slaughter to shape herself into the mother she wanted to be. She describes her inspiration to be Mary Poppins because she wants to wake up, get out of bed, get dressed and put on the best face for that day. Slaughter said that everyday, “You just go and you do it. They say that. If you stay flexible, you’ll never get bent out of shape.”