Colleen Pearce studied ceramics, drawing, and painting at the Museum School of Fine Arts in Boston and received her degree in education from Tufts. While her family was living in Australia for a year, she also earned a diploma in art history. Most recently, she has shown her work at the ARTSWorcester Biennial and at Bennington College/Mass Art group show.

She has taught at Tufts and the Museum School, public and private schools, and currently teaches classes and private lessons out of her studio in Harvard. She taught art at Woodland School in Weston and currently in the Lincoln Public School. Colleen is passionate about bringing art more fully into the lives of her students, to help her students retain or relearn their unencumbered creative spirit. She has been a guest lecturer at Tufts, led parent forums on the development of art in children, helped bring teachers from Uganda to Weston and organized parent volunteers to bring art history into the schools. Over the years she has solicited grants to be an artist in residence, integrating art and literacy for the second grade classrooms in the Lincoln Public Schools. She has inspired and assisted student creations of fantastic puppets which were then used to perform folk stories and fairy tales. This work was a wildly successful example of the power of art to propel a curriculum, and improve reading and comprehension skills.

Colleen is keenly aware through this work and her own personal artistic process that art can break us free. She says this about her work: "In my heart I believe the arts can help to heal and make whole. It is a place to put grief, fear, joy, and pain. Sometimes it is an escape into the observed beauty of our world. It is a way of connecting to the natural world and to humanity. After the planes hit the Towers, and we were all in a dazed state of shock and horror and unquenchable grief, I sat with some of my favorite paintings at the MFA, just to remind myself that we humans are also capable of unspeakable beauty.

My own drawing and poetry over the last few years has been both an escape into the beauty that surrounds us (for instance, noticing the grandeur of an unassuming moth) as well as a direct expression of powerfully felt emotions. I begin my drawing process with attentive looking at nature and then allow myself to sink into the materials. In my best work, I don’t know where I’m headed. I try and get out of the way, and allow what is deep inside a voice."

For more information about Colleen's art classes, call (978) 456-9160 or email her at hendrie.road@gmail.com.