I'm Betsy Etchart, and welcome to ColorWheels.
2024 marks my eighth year teaching art to students of all ages, from Toddler Mondays to Creative Aging classes in journaling in clay, book making, painting, and memoir.
But before I did that....I grew up in Southeast Alaska, where entertaining myself in a boat in the rain while waiting for a salmon to bite a frozen herring took the form of reading, writing, drawing, and carving oranges into elaborate cups for Mountain Dew. I left the drizzle behind when I went to college in New England, where I'd spent my early childhood digging for worms and presiding over frog races (those darned frogs never went the right way). But I couldn't shake the other stuff. I earned a B.A. in art history and creative writing (fortunately I was better at that than steering frogs or catching fish), and moved West again to edit cookbooks in Denver, Colorado. From there, I moved to the mountains of Idaho, where I wrote features, profiles, memoir, and dozens of sundry articles for magazines like Mountain Living and Sun Valley Magazine. I spent a year living in a yurt, for which my dog thanked me and my cat cursed me, before earning an MFA in creative nonfiction from Goucher College and moving to Arizona (for which my cat thanked me and my dog cursed me). That's where I am today, in Sonoran Desert suburbia, where I'm raising two boys and learning a lot about baseball and springboard diving while not doing any myself. I've taught memoir at a local college and poetry workshops to elementary students, published poetry for kids in Cricket, and been Master Artist for two Gallery 37 programs, partnering with another artist to lead art-loving high school students to create large-scale public art for the City of Avondale and the City of Glendale. I founded ColorWheels in 2017 in response to a need I saw for kids to MAKE stuff. With their HANDS. They wanted to! They just didn't get the chance. Post-covid, it's more important than ever. ColorWheels has grown to reach hundreds of students each year in after-school programs, summer camps where I pair up with drama and science teachers, and in private lessons. I've begun illustrating as well, pairing my lifelong love of writing with my lifelong love of picture books. And I'm two years into a daily therapeutic practice of journaling in clay. I've exhibited work from the series in galleries, and am working to launch the project on social media--any day now--as The Whole Ball of Clay. |
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