Anoka Faruqee and Michelle Grabner discuss common ground in their work and their experience as art educators.

Grabner remarks that “… indexing by way of crude stenciling has always been a way for me to achieve that sweet spot between abstraction and representation—to have something handmade without showing the hand.”

Faruqee observers: “I find myself thinking about is how work originates from some kind of unspoken pleasure. At some point, you stop fighting such proclivities and say, “That’s who I am, and it gives me a lot of pleasure.” As you start to unpack that, you find it’s actually bigger than individual desire: it’s cultural desire. Some of these desires—for order, rainbows, sunsets, gingham, or houndstooth—are expressed in cultural clichés. The reason I gravitated toward painting—and maybe you feel this, too—is that it is limited in this regard. It has boundaries and a shape.”