This semester Kayla Decoteau has started down the path of becoming an art teacher, learning how to balance her schedule of classes and observations. The 22-year-old senior art education major from Prairieville, La. sheds some light on what it is like to take on that responsibility. She gives a run through of her day observing and student teaching at Ponchatoula Junior High.

“I get to school and first hour, that’s our planning period, so I just kind of look over what I’m going to do,” said Decoteau. “Throughout the day I walk around and help the students with their art projects. Sometimes I try not to get too caught up in that because I need to focus on, ‘What is she doing? What are they doing? How is she responding to them?’ And seventh hour comes around and it’s my time to be the teacher.”

Decoteau’s art background lies in painting, which takes an organic nature. It took her only a short time to develop her style. Her junior year she took on the task of creating a white on white painting for her intermediate painting class.

“The whole painting would be white,” explained Decoteau. “As long as you had some 3D things that could maybe cast shadows, then that could help make a range of tints and shades for the painting. So I thought, ‘I could use anything. I could use straws.’ So I used straws.”

Her early paintings grew from that and utilized varying lengths and cuts of painted straws to create form and cast shadows on the canvas. She used spackle and gesso to bond the straws to the canvas. Since then, she’s moved on to using insulation foam as a vessel to hold the straws together and creating forms from and painting directly onto the foam.

“It’s actually quite an evolutionary process,” said Decoteau. “Right now I’m using insulation foam and that came about whenever I had to solve a problem. That’s the great thing about art; it’s always about solving problems. The problem was spackle and gesso. These are not good things to hold straws in. I thought I could use insulation foam. So I tried that and it works really great. So I had a mixture of insulation foam and straws and that morphed into just insulation foam. I just love the organic free fall of it. That’s what I experimented with.”

Decoteau’s foam paintings come with decent variety. Some of them resemble fetal forms, some look like skin stretching and tearing apart, and others sport tentacles and tendrils protruding in multiple directions. Some of her artwork can be colorful and bright while other pieces have muted and more neutral color pallets.

“With one of my paintings, the funny thing was at first I was trying to portray joy,” explained Decoteau. “I did it and I tore it apart and reassembled it three times. And every time I was like ‘I hate you.’ Joy turned into frustration. I feel like the whole time I was painting it I was screaming, well not really screaming; I was like stabbing it with the paintbrush the whole time. It wasn’t until I finally put it on the wall that I was like oh wow, that came out pretty well.”

Decoteau’s works now hang in her apartment, ready to be moved into a gallery. She plans to continue to add to her personal collection.

“I just want to make art,” said Decateau.