Andy Morris, a great art teacher

It is high time I dedicate a post to Andy Morris. Andy is an artist living in the US, I think it’s Phoenix, Arizona. I would never have heard of him, if it wasn’t for Udemy. On Udemy Andy has a series of abstract art courses.

Andy is my major art teacher. A long time ago I was in art school for a few years. I learned more from Andy in a 10 dollar Udemy course, than I did in several years of art school. Really. Why?

Even granted that at my age I am more susceptible to any teaching, in art school nobody was the slightest bit interested in teaching me anything. The teachers seemed to think of themselves as great artists marooned in that school. We were lucky if they even showed up after the break. Andy really tries to teach. And he does it in a super relaxed manner that makes it seem doable.

If it wasn’t for Andy, I might never have gone back to art at all. But one day I was looking for some abstract art for our renewed office building. I couldn’t find anything I liked that was within the budget. The renewal had already cost an impressive amount of money, so I wasn’t ready to spend 20.000 euro’s on art.

Then I ran into a Udemy course called ‘Exciting 7 Step Method to Abstract Painting‘. Hmm, I thought, that sounds like it has some structure to it. I looked at the course and I thought: Yeah, I might be able to do this. I got the course and I got the materials and I did the first step of Andy’s 7 step process. I had a white canvas, 90 x 90 cm, I had a new thick brush and I had black on the palette. I took the brush and made a first stroke.

And – it’s hard to describe – boom. Or something. It was as if something huge was falling into place. As if a huge object was falling into its slot. And I thought Yes! This is my thing.

I have been painting ever since and I bought just about every course Andy has on Udemy. Some people may think that he’s naive. My old art teachers almost certainly would. But I’ll take Andy over my old academy teachers any day.