My Travel Teaching Program

 

Thank you for your interest in having me travel to your space to teach art. I am grateful to be able to enter my new life chapter where I can once again say YES to travel teaching. I consider every invitation an honor and am committed to organizing and executing each workshop experience with artistic depth, elegance, meaning, fun, and approachability for learners of all levels. Here are some questions and answers to questions related to my travel teaching program:

Q: What sort of art workshops do you teach?
A: The following seven categories of art are generally what I teach. 

• Expressive Acrylic Painting: 1 full day up to 3 full days
• Expressive Watercolors & Stitches: 1 half day up to 2 full days 
• Expressive Blind Contour on paper and wood: 1 half day up to 1 full day
• Wire Sculpture: 1 half day up to 1 full day 
• Cardboard Art: 1 half day up to 1 full day
• Free Motion Art Stitching: 1 half day up to 1 full day
• Art Journaling & Creative Lettering: 1 half day up to 1 full day 
• 1 half day = 3 hours
• 1 full day = 6 hours + 1 hour for lunch

Within the above categories, I can tailor the workshop with an emphasis that you're interested in. For example, within painting, we could focus on portraits, or figurative art, or florals, portals, or still life,  etcetera. 

Q: Do you provide tools and materials?
A: No. With each workshop, I provide a list of materials that each student needs to bring to the workshop. Also, the hosting studio would need to equip the area with tables, chairs, and any other items that would help each student feel comfortable to create in.

Q: Can you teach art in a corporate team-building setting?
A: Yes. I have experience leading corporate team-building experiences through art. As long as your office can provide the space, and each participant is provided with materials for the workshop, it can happen. 

Q: What is your rate?
A: The hosting studio will be in charge of collecting payment (with any overhead markup for the studio) and then paying me per the following rates: 

• 1 half day: $50 per student per half day
• 1 full day: $120 per student per day
• 2 full days: $240 per student for 2 total days
• 3 full days: $360 per student for 3 total days

*Some classes will have a kit fee ranging from $10 to $40 per student which I can either collect from students on the day of the workshop or the studio can collect on my behalf and then transfer to me.

Q: Do you need support for travel expenses?
A: If your space is far enough where I need lodging, I would love it if you could host me in your home/facility so that neither you nor I have to budget for lodging. If there is not a host facility, I would appreciate support to offset lodging costs that I incur. If I travel to your space by air, I would need support to offset air travel and potentially ground transportation. 

Q: Do you have an enrollment minimum/maximum?
A: My minimum enrollment is six to eight students. I have no maximum.

Q: Can you help promote the workshop?
A: Yes! I think promotion is a team effort and I feel very comfortable using all of my social media platforms to creatively and effectively promote my workshops.

Q: I've taken your workshop. I want to paint with you in a private or semi-private setting. Is that possible?
A: Yes! If you are able to travel to my home studio in Santa Ana with a brown bag lunch, a private full day would be $200 per day. If you are able to bring another person or two for a semi-private, it would be $180 per day per person.

Q: I have a small group of people who want to go to your studio to paint. Is that possible?
A: At this time, my home studio can accommodate 4-5 people for a full-on painting workshop so yes. Each person would need to bring a brown bag lunch and for out-of-towners, you'd need to research and secure your lodging and ground transportation.

Q: I have a small group of people who I want to host either in my home or our community center for a celebration and I want them to paint. Would you be available for that?
A: Yep. This would be possible. Send me an email at jenny@crescendoh.com to iron out the details.

Q; Anything else?
A: I'm super open to communicating with you to discuss the specifics of what you're looking for and using our best ideas to make the workshop happen. Please feel free to email me at jenny@crescendoh.com to start the conversation. Please take a look at my expressive style of art at @jennydoh on Instagram and also at jennydoh.com. Loose and expressive is what I'm drawn to and what I teach. I am grateful for your interest.

Thank you.

Photos below are of some workshops I've taught in past years in
wonderful studios across the nation with extraordinary hosts and inspiring learners.

(San Diego, 2023)

(Seattle, 2017)

(Houston, 2017)

(Corporate team-building, Santa Ana, 2018)

(Bakersfield, 2016)

(Portland)

(Shreveport, 2019)

(Denver, 2018)

(Portland)

Bridge Across a Chasm

 

Who throws a party on a Tuesday? 

I guess I do, if you call what happened last Tuesday a party. It wasn't exactly that. It was more like a melding of love and life and music and art for three hours in my home with people from different pockets of my world. Some very familiar pockets and some newer ones that I'm getting to know. On a Tuesday. In the middle of summer. It felt like an art salon of vibrant vulnerability and joy.

My dear friend Dori had offered to come down from northern California and cook an Italian dinner for me and my friends as a gift. She had been unable to attend Gerardo's celebration and now, almost four months after that moment, I said hell yes to this unique bridge that she extended. 

I've been known to burrow myself into the hole of solitude like nobody else. I can hold my breath and stay there longer than anybody else. And within the last four months, I've realized that I don't want to do that. I could justify doing that by pointing out how flawed everything and everybody (especially me) is. And what would that give me? No friends. No love. No party. No art. No music. Nothing delicious. Not one thing.

We humans. We burn through life. 

I think I want to burn through it as artistically, creatively, and meaningfully as possible. Flaws and all. 

In giving, you throw a bridge across the chasm of your solitude.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Remembering Ignacio

 

On this Memorial Day 2023, it is my honor to wear one of the medals awarded Ignacio P. Mouet, my late father-in-law. Below are words that my late husband Gerardo Mouet penned on November 22, 2022 on his Facebook page, approximately four months before he passed:

The bravest man I have ever known was my Dad. They called him Ruso. As a Mexican national he volunteered in 1944 to become U.S. soldier. He gambled he would survive WW II and that the U.S. side would win. If all that happened he would become a U.S. Citizen and would be able to better take care of his beautiful Tijuana girlfriend that will eventually he would marry and ended becoming my mom [Migdalia Salinas].

My Dad has inspired me to start writing my first novel. If you look closely, you will see a business size Christmas card by his commanding general, General G. S. Patton Jr.

—Gerardo Mouet (November 22, 2022) 

Thank you to Ignacio and all others who served. We honor you.

Beautiful World, Where are You by Sally Rooney

 

LOOKING
Early in the book Beautiful World Where are You by Sally Rooney, the character Felix recounts when he lost his mom and remembers thinking "what's the fucking point of life, you know? It's not like there's anything at the end of it (57)." He says this to Alice, a successful novelist who, even with all of her success, also has a mound of grievances about the pointlessness of life. Alice and Felix have started something. Nothing to be certain about but perhaps something beautiful. At this start of this something, they look at each other ... "It was too dark for either of them to glean much information from the other's face, and yet they kept looking, and did not break off, as if the act of looking was more important than what they could see (58)."

AG and IG
Recently, I learned that along with theism, atheism ,and agnosticism, there is also a belief called ignosticism. There's something about the uncertainty embedded in agnosticism that I've always regarded as beautiful because it's within uncertainty that honest questions can be asked—where wonder and curiosity and imagination can be unleashed. Another reason I view agnosticism as beautiful is because the agnostic cares. We may not be certain, but we care about whether there is something after this.

Ignostics on the other hand don't know and don't care. Maybe that's why I've never been one.

OPPOSITE OF BEAUTIFUL
Eileen is an aspiring writer and Alice's best friend who is also searching for the answer to the question of whether there is beauty in the world. She points to the hopelessness of the chance that beauty is nowhere, especially given the futility of resisting the current soul-sucking attention economy that is fueled by what I think is opposite of beautiful, which is garish certainty:

"I looked at the internet for too long today and started feeling depressed. The worst thing is that I actually think people on there are generally well meaning and the impulses are right, but our political vocabulary has decayed so deeply and rapidly since the twentieth century that most attempts to make sense of our present historical moment turn out to be essentially gibberish. Everyone is at once hysterically attached to particular identity categories and completely unwilling to articulate what those categories consist of, how they came about, and what purposes they serve. The only apparent schema is that for every victim group ... there is an oppressor group ... But in this framework, relations between victim and oppressor are not historical so much as theological, in that the victims are transcendently good an the oppressors are personally evil ... and a great amount of our discourse is devoted to sorting individuals into their proper groups, which is to say, giving them their proper moral reckoning (81)." 

SPOILER ALERT: NO SORDID SEX
For a large portion of the book, the tension that was building made me think that Alice and Felix, along with Eileen and her love Simon would all end up in a sordid foursome.

But that is not the way the story ends up. (Not that I would think less of them if it had.) It actually ends up with Alice making the case that her very simple life choices of the moment ... to put the writing life on hold, to love Simon and to have a baby with him reflect that humanity at its core isn't about extraordinarily sordid heights but rather, ordinary levels of  care. To care, even in uncertainty.

PODOCANA: Sober Curious with Jason Gots

 

It's like a book club but instead of discussing books, PODOCANA discusses specific podcast episodes. Last night, PODOCANA discussed the Sober Curious podcast episode featuring an interview with my amazing author friend, Jason Gots. It was thrilling to welcome a whole new cohort into PODOCANA—namely many of my former UCI students who I am so proud of and am grateful to have in my life.

Crisynda, one of the regular PODOCANA members couldn't be there because she was feeling under the weather but sent me some thoughts after she listened to the podcast which I read to the group to start off the discussion:

I think one of the points of the podcast episode that struck me hard was in fact how Jason made a conscious choice to be with Mary without judgement ... not as a parental figure or a sponsor figure but simply as an accepting figure who could meet Mary where she was—not to enable her per se, but to be with her without prejudice. It got me thinking about how I think I could do that more easily with certain relationships (like a friend or a sibling) and less easily with other relationships (like a child).

Other things we pondered as a group include:

• whether time to dedicate to one's mindfulness is tied to the amount of privilege we have
• the importance of recognizing the differing cup sizes we each hold in terms of our ability to receive what another person gives to us
• whether resisting easy answers is inherently valuable or whether sometimes it's ok not to resist them just because they seem easy
• that it's ok to not do anything about changing a feeling that we are experiencing even though popular narratives might convince us that certain feelings require change
• how everybody lives with bias (even those of us who think we don't)
• the importance of recognizing context

We also shared what each of us love to drink (both alcoholic and non-alcoholic). The responses were fun to hear! My favorite non-alcoholic drink is topo chico with coconut juice. My favorite alcoholic drink as of late is an Irish whiskey (Jameson). Neat.

Here is my full book review of Humanity is Trying by Jason Gots.

If you live near Santa Ana and would like to join in on a future PODOCANA and love discussions that feel like you're in an idea lab instead of an echo chamber, send me a note. 

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

 

I FINALLY finished reading Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner today. I wasn't in H Mart when I finished reading it. I was in my bed. My new bed. And in my new bed, I cried as I read the final gut-wrenching sentence (in her memoir about the complex bond between she and her dying mom) that broke me into many pieces. A final sentence that only a person who has experienced profound loss can write. The kind of sentence that requires a wisdom that can only be acquired through the throughness of it all. Until you go through the complexity and the dread and the beauty of it all. Until you sing it, weep it, scream it, convulse it, choke on it, drown in it, and come back up for air gasping on it. 

I never knew I'd be sleeping in a new bed. Smaller than the bed Gerardo and I had together. Bigger than the hospital bed that had replaced our large bed for the last couple of years—the one he used before he passed. I never knew I'd ever own anything called Queen-sized. I never knew. Until now, as I know.

Crying in H Mart is the first book Gerardo and I selected for our book club for two: Jenny & Gerardo's Book Club. The club was organized in such a way that I would read it aloud to him on days when he needed a distraction from his pain ... pain so severe that he couldn't read anything on his own. Pain that only allowed reading to be done aloud to him, in small spurts.

There were eerie similarities between the suffering that Gerardo and Michelle's mom went through. There were eerie similarities about the love and tension and struggles of being a dying person and being a person with a dying person: "My mother had struggled to understand me just as I struggled to understand her (p. 169)." Sometimes I had to put the book down because Gerardo and I had to pause and weep together as we could see what was coming down the pike as we saw what was happening to Michelle's mother. 

Our book club never moved onto a second book mainly because our club wasn't able to complete Crying in H Mart as Gerardo passed before we could finish it together. 

An important and courageous facet of this book is Michelle's ability to confront some of the unfairness she bestowed onto her mom—a narrative so common that it has become an embarrassing cliche—of a child punching the lowest hanging fruit, citing imperfections of a parent as the forever reasons of the adult child's imperfections of the present. The confrontation is admirable because she is able to articulate a kind of regret that can only be summoned when faced with losing a flawed and loving parent while riding a high horse for much too long: "Sure, I had taken my upbringing for granted, I had lashed out at the ones who loved me the most, allowed myself to flounder in a depression I perhaps had no real right to (p. 176)."

The way a person goes through grief is unique to each person. And the way a person cares for oneself and becomes self-aware is unique to each person. Michelle's epiphany about therapy and self-care is something I love: "Nothing my therapist said was anything I hadn't psychoanalyzed in myself a million times already anyway. I was paying a hundred-dollar copay per session, and I began to think it would be much more fulfilling to just take myself out for a fifty-dollar lunch twice a week. I canceled the rest of my sessions and committed myself to exploring alternative forms of self-care (p. 212)."

My self-care these days includes saying yes to invitations by my trusted friends who are circling their wagons around me with their loving, watchful eyes. I have committed to never turning down an invitation from this circle so that I can remain engaged with good people and have good spaces to process what I'm going through without receiving an invoice from such interactions. My self-care also includes letting it all flow through me—where I let myself cry in H Mart if I feel like it, or Albertsons if I feel like it, or Target if I feel like it, or my Queen-sized bed if I feel like it. Or to let myself laugh with somebody or everybody or nobody at all. And mostly, to let the sensibility of Michelle guide me in not taking anything for granted and making every moment count, and letting Gerardo's sensibility guide me in finding ways to pursue new purpose and enjoy life not later, but now.

We Are One: My Eulogy for Gerardo Mouet

Celebration of Life for Gerardo Mouet

March 17, 2023 • 5PM

Santa Ana, California

We Are One: Eulogy by Jenny Doh

Thank you for being here. Thank you for loving, remembering, and celebrating Gerardo Mouet.

 

THE PERFECT FIRST BITE

One of my favorite memories of Gerardo is of a hot summer day when we were dating. We got everything packed including a watermelon that Gerardo couldn’t wait to eat. I was looking forward to eating it too, but I wasn’t as excited about it as he was. When we got to the beach, he started cutting up that watermelon and he pulled out the first wedge. I knew he wanted to gobble up that perfect first bite but then his gaze turned toward me and offered it to me instead. That was Gerardo.

 

ANYWHERE BUT HERE

Another memory is when I decided to put my career on hold to stay at home with our infant son and toddler daughter. As much as this was my choice, I was overwhelmed by it. Gerardo one day rushed home at around noon and when I asked why he was home he said that he wanted me to have some fun and that I could go anywhere I wanted to, for one hour. So, I took that hour, wearing stretchy pants, shirt with dried-up baby vomit, and unwashed hair in a ponytail, in search of a place that was anywhere but here. I ended up going through the drive thru at McDonald’s to get a soft serve ice cream cone and then parking my car at the CVS parking lot and blasting the radio as I imagined myself in alternate realities. It was the most glorious hour and I would come to enjoy that type of hour on several days when my husband came to help me have some fun as I remained tethered to my actual reality. That was Gerardo.

 

ARE YOU SURE?

Another memory is the day when I decided to become a working artist. This is after the many twists and turns that my career had taken me, from social worker, to El Sol charter school fundraiser, to magazine editor, to book producer, to art studio owner. With every new career interest, Gerardo was my biggest cheerleader. But when I decided that I wanted to paint, I was concerned that he might say something like “Again? You’re changing your mind again?” But he didn’t say that. He asked me only one question. He asked, “Jenny, are you sure?” And when I said that I was, he said, “Okay then, let’s get things ready so you can paint.” To which I countered by asking what we would do with all the paintings. To which he countered, “If you’re going to be a painter, the only thing you should be thinking about is painting. You should not be thinking about where to put those paintings. If we need to rent storage, we will rent storage. Your job from now on is to paint.” That was Gerardo.

 

FOR MORE THAN A DECADE

In 2013, Gerardo had surgery to remove a cancerous tumor from his bile duct. Every year after the surgery there were things that started to happen as other complications related to that cancer and surgery emerged. For the past five years, he started to significantly suffer. For the past two years, he had debilitating pain with scattered moments of no pain. For the past eight months, there was agonizing physical and emotional pain, and for the last two months before he passed, he had the kind of suffering that no living creature should ever endure.

 

One of the things that comforted Gerardo in the midst of his suffering was for him to put pencil to paper and write. He loved to use a wooden #2 with a good white eraser top. Even if what he wrote didn’t make any sense, the process of writing helped him. Incredibly, during one hospitalization when he called me before I came to visit him, he asked me to bring something to the hospital. I thought he would say a clean shirt or a soft blanket. Rather, he asked me for just one thing: a pencil sharpener. That was Gerardo.

 

During the past year, his favorite beverage at home was cranberry juice mixed with topo chico. And true to his Director form, he wanted each mix to be just the way he wanted as he pursued the perfect blend and would ask me “Honey, can you bring me a cranberry and topo chico and this time can you make it with 65 percent cranberry and 35 percent topo chico?” That was Gerardo.

 

On February 28^th after Gerardo had been taken from UCI to UCLA by ambulance, Gerardo told me that he had no more fight left in him and that he wanted hospice. On March 2^nd, his sister Lily flew into Orange County and Manuel Gomez picked her up and drove her to UCLA to be at Gerardo’s bedside with me. On March 4^th at UCLA, Gerardo transitioned into comfort care at which time the doctors and nurses said he was allowed to eat or drink whatever he wanted. He asked me to get him popsicles. And true to his Director form, he said to me “Cherry is ok but grape would be preferred.” So, I walked to Whole Foods in Westwood and got him popsicles which he enjoyed. During those moments, I was able to tell him that as difficult as this past decade has been, it has been my honor and privilege to care for him and take him to the finish line, no matter the outcome. And to my face streaming with tears, he said “Jennycita, I want you to be happy, starting NOW.” That was Gerardo.

 

The truth is, he had always wanted me to be happy. That had been his goal as my husband. For me to have fun and to be happy.

 

WISDOM

On tonight’s program, you will see the words by Confucius, that guided his adult life:

As the sun makes it new

day by day make it new

yet again make it new

 

You will also see the words he penned as Director of Parks & Rec to guide the agency:

Learn.

 Have fun.

 Get fit.

Be respectful.

 

You will also see the words he repeated to anyone who ever talked to him about the joys and tragedies of life:

Everything has a beginning, middle, and an end.

 

You will also see the words he penned on a final paper for a philosophy class that he took at UC San Diego where after writing about all the readings and lectures for the class, he put forth his bold concluding thesis in the final paper, positing that:

We are one.

 

Sadly, he got that paper back from the teaching assistant who used a big fat red pen to cross out his thesis and write back “No we are not!” with a failing grade.

STARTING NOW 

I think that that teaching assistant was full of bitter grievance. Grievance easy to catch and difficult to get rid of. I think Gerardo was correct. I think as we in this world try to hold onto perceived grievances, and as we point to what Kristin Dombek describes in her essay as The Selfishness of Others, we forget that we too are perpetuators of all that we disdain. We are (as masterfully illustrated by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert), all muddling through EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE, ALL AT ONCE. And when voices try to convince me that nothing matters, I will strive to make each day new and join Gerardo’s optimistic thesis in recognizing that indeed, we are one.

 

Before we raise our popsicles to Gerardo, I want to thank my trusted friends—my girlfriends, my gym friends, my barre friends, my art friends, my UCI friends, and most of all, I want to thank Lily. In Spanish, the term for sister-in-law is cuñada. Technically, she is my cuñada. The word for sister is hermana. And that is who she has become for me. Mi hermana.

 

Lily: thank you for being there for Gerardo during his suffering and for being with me by his bedside at UCLA as he transitioned from intensive care to comfort care and then at home to hospice care. Thank you for being with me to help work through the layers of sorrow, the rage, the exhaustion, the relief, the love, the forgiveness, and the peace. Thank you for echoing Gerardo’s charge for me to be happy, starting NOW

 

And now, whether you have a cherry or grape or orange popsicle, let’s raise it together.

 

To Gerardo. May he rest in peace.