"The Big Picture" According to Casey Read (MFA 2014)

In New York City, I have discovered an overwhelming wealth of information regarding sensory overload. Touching, smelling, tasting, hearing, and seeing everything, like a trip to the grocery store. Touching subway poles, smelling the car exhaust, tasting the worldly cuisines, and watching the masses pass and shove their way through to the next event of the day. But I have not experienced, in my short time here, anything like the opening of The Big Picture.

Mark Tansey, Coastline Measure 1987

Mark Tansey, Duet, 2004

On the night of the opening, I hardly looked at the art. The floor was filled with people stretching to look at the works and chat amongst themselves. A slight social anxiety crept over a few of the current students at the New York Academy of Art, me included. There are only seven pieces in The Big Picture, which made the gallery appear smaller than usual and with all the people inside the hallway, there was no way to fully experience each piece. This isn’t to say that the night was made worse, the crowd filled the air with an excitement I had never seen at the school and I felt pleased to know that each time someone passed through our doors, another face lit up with a sense of awe. After painting class yesterday, I ventured downstairs to realize the privilege of viewing the artwork one-on-one. Once I experienced the show on my own, there was no comparison to seeing it with human heads blocking the view. It sounds silly, but I felt a near spiritual involvement with the work, as though I had meditated and had a conversation with each at the same time. I had been painting from life the entire day, moving at a range of distances from my 36 inches x 42 inches canvas to gain a better understanding of how it looked from up close and far away. I especially noticed this with the work by Mark Tansey. I approached his work until I was sitting an arm’s length away and realized that the entire illusion of space and depth in his painting, Coastline Measure, were created by nothing more than scribbles. My interest increased as I got up and walked backwards from the scribbles. I felt like a child again - a smile grew on my face, “It’s like magic”!  Not only did I feel childlike as a result of Tansey’s "magic trick" with mark-making, but also due to the fact that I was physically about a third of the size of his 87 inches x 122 inches piece. 

Jenny Saville, Bleach, 2008

Though I had not been particularly interested in the work of Jenny Saville, I certainly am now. The digital images of her work flatten and simplify the massive brushstrokes that add a voluminous appearance to the paint itself.  Each layer added to the face in the painting made me recall my interest in anatomy; Saville allows the viewer to see through skin, bruises, blood, all the way down to the deepest parts of the person depicted. For the first time, I saw and understood that the eyes were smooth and glassy and are windows inside rather than meshing with the rest of the flesh.

Eric Fischl, Krefeld Project: Living Room, Scene 1, 2002

Eric Fishl, Corrida In Ronda # 4, 2008

Eric Fischl is actually one of the reasons I came to study at the Academy- I had never heard of the school until I e-mailed him for a project interview in undergraduate school and he replied.  He even told me about the Academy after he asked me to send him pictures of my work.  Eric changed the way I think about painting. As a drawing concentration in undergrad, painting meant I had dabbled in abstract acrylic painting since high school and then took two classes in college. It was intimidating- it meant color and wet stuff and, basically, making a lot of terrible art. I did and still do make terrible paintings, but the difference is that researching artists, their work, and how they make it helped me make some good ones too. Fischl was one of the first painters I really looked into and I was surprised to discover that his process involved photography and even mismatching figures from separate photos and shoving them in together. Not only that, but he also based much of his early work on unnerving suburban unrest which I completely related to growing up in Southern California. Seeing his work for the first time in the flesh is something personal and special to me.

Now we get to Vincent Desiderio: Father, husband, and considered (by me) to be one of the most prolific painters in these contemporary times. Of all the paintings in The Big Picture, his is the largest, entitled Quixote. Comprised of three parts (that I initially did not come close to understanding), it tortures the viewer with a heart-shaped object (perhaps a piano) falling amongst the clouds, a silhouette of a bicycle, and a slaughtered animal (a pig, I believe). To me, it almost seems like he is trying to play a game with me like "hey, make a word out of these three images" or "what do these things have in common" or even "I have seen these images on a daily basis, have you?"  I find myself struggling to make an answer for these metaphoric images, but maybe that is the point. There are obscurities in life that we, as people, were never meant to find an answer to.  The novel A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy comes to mind in which the smartest computer in the universe is asked "the ultimate question to life, the universe, and everything" and comes up with the answer "42". Either that, or I need to do more research on this brilliant guy.

Vincent Desiderio, Quixote, 2008

Neo Rauch Hausmeister, 2002

Neo Rauch is a weirdo. I mean this in the most loving way. Hausmeister appears like an old billboard from the 1950’s on homeschooling. His voyeuristic approach to the home setting offers the viewer a strange look at a family in an unbalanced situation. Plates are stacked off to the right of the scene, held together by colorful goo that is repeated in the geology poster that the woman in the painting gestures towards, her gaze down at the boy (who has his back turned to the viewer). It seems as though everything in the scene is failing; the woman appears to be teaching, but the boy is busy taking a bottle of something out of a mini fridge. Only, it might not be a refrigerator at all and an odd, deformed statue of a unicorn type creature stands atop the "refrigerator." The man in the room looks grim, yet indifferent to the situation. Neo Rauch composes places that, at first glance, seem ordinary or even dull. But looking further, the scene can create a realm for the viewer in which there is no sense and only a dark humor to drown in. In order to enter into the world of this piece, you will have to see it for yourself.

I encourage anyone who has   To me, the collection is a surprising commentary on the digital age, the negatives and positives of the iconic power of the photograph handed to human kind on a massive scale, like fire given to man. The exploration of paint expressed in The Big Picture creates a face of hope, dismay, and unpredictability for the traditional artists in this age of the powerful pictures.

##

The Big Picture is currently on view at the Wilkinson Gallery at the New York Academy of Art located at 111 Franklin Street between West Broadway & Church through March 2nd.  Be sure to visit the exhibition during the gallery hours of 2:00-8:00pm daily except Wednesdays and holidays.  Admission is free.  For more information on The Big Picture please visit its exhibitions page on the Academy's website.

Artist and Teaching Residency for West Nottingham Academy - Part 2

By Jacob Hicks (MFA 2012) 

My experience at West Nottingham Academy has been one of learning in many regards.  Along side my time working in the studio, I teach two high school courses-an introduction to drawing and studio painting.  To teach is to become firm enough in your artistic practice to share it.  It calls for a re-examination of formal and conceptual principles and applicable history.  Art is such an ancient and expansive field that it is hard to imagine any other mode of thought not relevant to its understanding, i.e. science, literature, music, mathematics, religion, etc.  To say the task of infusing its vast wealth into young minds is daunting is to not dabble in hyperbole. 

         



West Nottingham Academy embeds its pupils in a program that teaches the values of creative art, exposing them early on to the richness of the practice. Students in my introduction to drawing-freshman and sophomores-mostly came in as clean slates, with little to no guided study. My task became setting a precedent of enjoyable learning.  I wanted to make it rigorous yet fun so that the children might become converts to its ways and not end up with future disjointed memories of art fused with disinterest.

The first lesson, and one of my favorites so far, was a practical study in analytic and synthetic cubism.  Cubism is a 20th century art movement, the visual equivalent of a parallel advancement in the sciences-relativity.  Advancements rarely populate single territories, but spread across all of the humanities; there are cubist poets as well as modern authors who used verbalization to express similar revelations of the period, just in different mediums.  To help my pupils grasp an abstract concept, I created a studio exercise.  Each chose a partner and cycled between posing for and drawing one another for ten minute sessions.  After one round the original pose was again taken, but each artist worked from a new viewpoint.  This second perspective was layered upon the previous, thus illustrating multiple vantages of a single object, effectively fragmenting its stability.  This is the nature of analytic cubism.

After several rounds of perspectival layering, the students then collaged words and images on top of their works.  Like the synthetic cubists, the students playfully mixed and matched the medium of text with that of drawing, collaging together various modes of thought and expression.

Each week we work on a new project, and included are pictures of some of the most successful works.  (I have also included a photo of the painting I am making while my students work.)

My painting students have had more experience, being juniors and seniors who have taken several semesters of art.  Most of them, however, have not had much experience with oil painting.  I designed the course to teach the students the principles and craft of oil painting from start to finish, through canvas construction and surface preparation to indirect and direct painting application, all based on various modes of historical practice.  The students work on a single composition throughout the course; so far they have created the surface-gessoed canvas on stretchers, composed the drawing, painted the drawing achromatically, applied generalized dead palate color, and are now working to finalize the image with multiple glazes and layers of full chroma.  I asked that each composition include a subject and environment and elements of the imagination.  This course is far-reaching in that it introduces and explains painting material and its history, the principles of design and composition, tonal structure and drawing,  intensive color-theory, and the use of oil medium directly vs. indirectly.  

Each student is asked to meet painting progression deadlines, contribute during critique of one another’s work, and present analysis on old master compositions of their choosing based on all of the formal, material, and historical information we cover. 

We have a way to go before the class concludes with a student organized show in the school gallery, where we can celebrate everyone’s achievements.  I must say, all the work is definitely paying off; I have included some shots of the paintings in their current states.

I am having a wonderful time not just teaching, but learning daily from my students.  Each subject they choose to represent sets me on an experimental hunt alongside of them to find the clearest, most luminous way to embody it.






##Jacob Hicks (MFA 2012) will be blogging here throughout his artist residency at West Nottingham Academy, Colora, Maryland about his experience.  If you have any questions for Jacob, please leave them in the comments section of the blog. 

All photographs taken by Jacob Hicks.

Artist and Teaching Residency for West Nottingham Academy - Thus Far

By Jacob Hicks (MFA 2012) 

My excitement could not be tempered as my father helped me load up a U-haul rental with my current body of work in the early morning hours of an overcast Brooklyn morning.  I had received my Joseph Campbell-esque call to new adventure in the form of an artist/teacher-in-residence acceptance phone call from West Nottingham Academy a few weeks prior, but now the moment of action was upon me. 

Durga (in progress)

West Nottingham Academy has a special relationship to New York Academy of Art in that our highly respected senior critic Eric Fischl was an alumni of the boarding high school (which just so happens to be the oldest institution of its kind in the nation).  Mr. Fischl decided to construct a bridge between the Academy and WNA to provide an enriched artistic program for the high school and a funded opportunity for selected Academy alumni to gain a trimester’s worth of teaching experience and a sheltered, quiet space for art production.

As my father and I pulled onto and off of busy city-scenic highways (I myself having forgotten the burden of traipsing giant automobiles through urban asphalt labyrinthian webbings; I am strictly publicly transported these days), painting and drawing projects that could finalize the syllabi for my two classes popped in and out, on and off in my mind, like interstate entrance and exit signage or traffic lights. The program to which I was headed was to provide room and board, three wonderfully well-cooked meals a day, a beautiful three-windowed studio space, a solo-exhibition, a generous stipend, and two studio courses to teach five days a week for the duration.  I want to make clear the immense benefits of this for current and future alumni, because the program is available for you to apply to every session, and three alumni total are awarded the residency every year. 

Upon arrival in a lush rural landscape, overgrown with the stunning type of nature I didn’t yet realize I yearned for,  I met Trish Kuhlman, head of WNA’s art department.  Trish, an immensely talented painter and teacher, whose care for and responsibility to her students goes above and beyond the call, introduced me to faculty, staff, and students.  Everyone showed (and continues to show) me such hospitality and welcome that I immediately became convinced I serendipitously turned up in some type of cinematic vision of paradise, where community is close and caring, where nature exhales a majesty that I then breath, where education unites and illuminates. 

My father and I, elated and hopeful, unloaded the truck.  Within the next two days we hung my show, the gallery being a beautifully open space in the main school building, and the proud owner of an authentic Foucault Pendulum, an early mechanical device that legitimized the theory that our Earth was in orbit (I could have believed the theory without the device, seeing as how my world never sits still for too long).  

 

I have now settled in and have moved through several wonderfully fun projects with my classes, all the while contentedly working along on my current composition.  Still, only two weeks have passed!

I fear the difficulty will now be for WNA to pry me loose at the end of my trimester, for I have fallen in love with this intimate, beautiful rural oasis.






##
Jacob Hicks (MFA 2012) will be blogging here throughout his artist residency at West Nottingham Academy, Colora, Maryland about his experience.  If you have any questions for Jacob, please leave them in the comments section of the blog. 

All photographs taken by Jacob Hicks.