Art and Life. Life and Art.

By Maria Teicher, MFA 2013


On my bus ride from New York to Philadelphia this evening I found my mind trailing towards the ideas behind my work. I am just beginning to be able to articulate and speak about them.  It feels like an artist statement that is taking years to be able to write, but it’s slowing surfacing.

I am consistently inspired by the people I surround myself with and the stories that present themselves to me through simple conversations and honestly caring about others.  I then use symbols (artifacts, body language, facial expression, light) to articulate these ideas.  Although what I present in my work is always intentional, I attempt to keep these pictures open-ended. I hope I can allow my viewer the space to bring their own experiences and thoughts (personal, historical and instinctual) into the scene I have created.  With this, I aspire to connect my viewer to my subject and because of my connection to those I paint, a connection with me.  I want to show (somehow) that we are all joined together, no matter our age, cultural differences, economic states, or social statuses.

        
As my bus ride was ending, I turned on some music to clear my head and prepared for an extended weekend back home.  The bus crossed the bridge and my mind left my art practice and focused on other things. 

        
Upon leaving the bus, I grabbed my bag and headed towards 30^th street station.  A woman on the corner asked me where to get the train, I told her and we both headed inside, parting ways.  After a few minutes within the station, I came out the other side to hail a cab.  The same woman I had seen just 5 minutes earlier asked if I was heading towards the airport.  I said I wasn’t and she told me she was just trying to find someone to possibly split some cab fare with.  She explained that with the heightened holiday prices of the bus, her cash was limited to be able to get where she needed to go in a timely manner.  I stated that I was sorry and hoped she found a way.  I seemed to be the only person who would talk to her.  Perhaps it was our previous conversation, but I believe it was something more.

She wasn’t asking for any monetary help but it was clear she needed a way to bring some sort of joy and ease to her night.  Looking slightly alternative myself, I noticed her dreads and relaxed demeanor.  Others around weren’t giving her the time of day and I guessed that was the reason why.  She wasn’t homeless or a beggar.. just unique.  Seeing her, I reflected back on stories my fiancé would tell me about his days on the road as a touring musician.  He hit some hard times, never asking anyone for a single dollar.. but damn, how just one could’ve helped.  His sleeve of tattoos and punk rock attitude would’ve deterred people from caring about his misfortunes and often did. 

I put my bag in the trunk of the cab and reached in my pocket to make sure I had my keys out.  I remembered that I had a $5 bill tucked away for coffee or food that I didn’t use.  Without thinking about it too much, I ran back to her and handed it over.  I told her I hoped it helped some and she immediately turned it down, saying she’d just wait for the train.  I insisted and with a look of shock and awe, she immediately broke into one of the most genuine smiles I’ve seen in quite some time.  She gave me the biggest, warmest hug and we wished each other a very happy holiday as she thanked me again. 

        
Connecting with a story from someone I care about brought light into a new experience.  Inspired by someone I love, I related to a total stranger. 

___

            

They say art imitates life and life imitates art, but why can’t they just be one? The things we, as artists, choose to present to the world should be genuine.  They really shouldn’t stop with paper, canvas, clay or camera.  I truly believe it is all connected and it’s time to start making a change.

        
Today’s experience reminded me that the path I’ve chosen is not in vain.  It is a representation of who I truly am, both with a brush in my hand and a spare $5 in my pocket.

Maria Teicher is a second year MFA student (MFA 2013).  She often lends her voice to the Academy blog.  You can read more of those pieces by clicking the "Maria Teicher" label and you can follow her blog www.mariateicher.blogspot.com.

UNCHARTED: the 2011 MFA Thesis Exhibition

The New York Academy of Art is pleased to present UNCHARTED, a group exhibition featuring original paintings, drawings, sculpture and prints by sixty talented emerging artists.

Immersed for two years in an intensive learning environment that combines rigorous skills and conceptual training, these MFA candidates are using a time-honored artistic language from which they are creating innumerable distinct dialects. The 2011 graduates of the New York Academy of Art reveal that they are sixty individuals striding sure-footed onto an entirely contemporary landscape.

A catalog will be available, featuring an essay by renowned art critic and Academy Senior Critic Donald Kuspit. The title for the exhibition was suggested by MFA candidate Emily Adams. (Emily is also a guest-writer on this blog! Use the SEARCH bar, left, to see her other posts about her thesis artwork. RSVP to our event on the Academy's page on facebook.)

The exhibition is free and open daily from Noon – 7pm, (closed May 20)
May 17 - May 27, 2011
Opening: Monday, May 16, 6 - 8 PM
http://www.nyaa.edu/

Cornscapes

Ode to Nebraska, oil on canvas, 48x60in.

by Emily Adams (MFA 2011)
It’s the end of the semester and we’re seeing our MFA Thesis projects through to completion. To close up the posts on my thesis process throughout second year here at the Academy, I thought I’d share several of my most recent paintings, along with some interesting work that has been brought to my attention over the course of the past couple months. Exploring American farmland, aerial view, has been like picking up a rock to discover a whole other world underneath. With one of the simplest of subjects—the grid—I’ve found all kinds of problems to try to solve over the months. A straight grid speaks to an entirely different history of painting than one shifted into perspective, color and atmosphere follow different sets of rules when investigated from 30,000 feet in the air, and the surface of the painting itself has become a more significant subject when the image is so pared down. Most importantly to me, the grid as farmland, too, lends additional elements of narrative and symbolic suggestion that only representational painting can bring. Who would have thought soybeans and corn could offer so many aesthetic possibilities?

Crops (Night Raid), oil and alkyd on panel, 18x36in.

Ode to Kansas, oil and alkyd on canvas, 48x60in.

Carpet design by Florian Pucher

In the past couple of months, friends have sent along various sightings of crops popping up in several corners of art and design worlds. I wasn’t really looking to be in dialogue with a carpet designer, but this just confirms my suspicion that the grid is slowly making its way into our visual culture as a new, dominating form of landscape.

Also, if anyone can help me, I am still trying to track down the artist who made this piece spotted hanging at a gallery on 23rd St.

William Steiger's Aerial Survey #2 at Margaret Thatcher Projects
[Identified- Thanks to John Jacobsmeyer]

As I look forward to developing my own work after graduation, I’ll be thinking a lot more about the concept of 'cultivation' particularly in the context of the early American botanical and cultural history that I am related to. Culture, the word itself, has its Latin roots in tilling and agriculture, so exploring the 'cultivation' of a society in a new landscape by juxtaposing variations in the traditions of landscape and flower painting (considering flowers moved with people across seas to be hybridized and seeded in so-called 'virgin' soil) seems to me a good place to dig for now. Here are a couple of interesting grandparents of the melded genres:

Giovanni DiPaolo, St. John the Baptist Goes
Into the Wilderness, tempera on poplar, 1454

Jacques Le Moyne De Morgues,
Young Daughter of the Picts, circa 1585

Printmaxing!

by Aliene De Souza Howell (MFA 2011)

I started printmaking again last semester after years away from it.

Since taking the Narrative Printmaking Seminar, I started creating relief linocuts inspired from poetry. This acted as a significant catalyst in freeing up the imagery in my work. I felt I could get away with anything because of the graphic quality of the black and white and the finality of carving that lent a certain austerity to the image.

I’ve just started using animals as a lens to look at ideas of social practice and how, as humans, we’ve chosen to cultivate ourselves. I’ve always responded to the impact of life size work where you could really enter into the image and have always worked large in my paintings, so I thought I’d push my printmaking and began to work on a 36” x 60” image.

Printmaking instructor John Jacobsmeyer, Yi Cao, Post-Graduate
Teaching Assistant Jan Pecarca and Aliene set the press.

Due to its monstrous size, I needed assistance printing it. The press bed was maxed out and we even had to re-adjust it (a risky feat) and send the block back through the press a second time in order to print the entirety of the image. It worked out and I’ve just begun my second large print!

Pulling it off the press - a first look...

The linocut, finished!

From the distance of a map-maker

By Emily Adams, MFA 2011
The recent talk of censorship in the arts has me thinking more about the relationship between map-maker and mapped; gardener and garden; artist and artwork.

I came across early survey maps of the American West designed by the US Department of the Interior. A neatly organized drawing carefully, lawfully delineates a landscape of an area of New Mexico in the nineteenth century stages of American ‘land ownership.’

US Department of Interior survey plat, New Mexico, 1880

Around that time, the US government moved the Navajo people to an internment camp in Fort Sumner while government officials remapped their landscape along reservation borders. Navajo landscape changed from something lived, known from ground perspective, marked by its four sacred mountains; to a map, a paper document depicting, in aerial perspective, space as geometrical patterns and a carefully rendered line. “We will make a boundary line outside of which you must not go… you must live at peace,” said General William Sherman**.


As I develop my farmland images in paint (departing from my earlier works on photographs), I’ve been thinking more about the way maps feel. I get a sense of awe with the aerial view of farmland because what I see vacillates between map and fields. In the true-to-form representation of the landscape as photograph or painting, the image may still be read as non-objective.

(Developing farmland in oil paint, stage I)

(Developing farmland in oil paint, stage II)

It it is interesting to me how the distance between the map-maker and the thing mapped, the dissociation of the person from the place or thing they are arranging, allows for a relationship in which the subject is a non-objective thing to the map-maker. Some contemporary voices note the violence that can arise from this distance; that the agricultural policies and practices responsible for the farm-grids are violent, environmentally and socially; that there was violence in the homesteading maps, violence in the reservation mapping, violence in Indian assimilation policies (the mapping of one culture’s visual presentation onto another)*.

Students, Carlisle Indian School: photograph by John N. Choate,
before and after entrance to the school. Pictured are Wounded Yellow Robe,
Timber Yellow Robe, Henry Standing Bear
(Archives and Special Collections, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA)

As for art and artists, I’m looking at the extremes of Burtynsky’s landscapes, which hover in the sublime space between beauty and violence, and Agnes Martin’s non-objective paintings—maps of a ‘clear mind,’ as she once said. Now, I'm asking myself: How might my own paintings represent this space between map and the thing mapped? And what kinds of maps do I have access to, that are personal enough that I can use without appropriating; that I can engage in without losing sight?

Edward Burtynsky, Kennecott Copper Mine No. 22, Bingham Valley, Utah 1983

Agnes Martin

*The article is written by a student who will be visiting New York City in the Spring on a trip organized by my former colleague, Joan Levitt. I will be joining them, and helping to organize a tour of the Met.

**From Peter Iverson's 'Dine: A history of the Navajos'. University of New Mexico Press. 2002.

Land Use Interpretation

By Emily Adams (MFA 2011)

A "sbloomberg" on Franklin Ave, Brooklyn

The snow plow outside my apartment was stuck for two days. On the second day, a group of guys decided to build a "sbloomberg," a Bloomberg snowman, in front of the giant, frozen metal blade. As the uncollected trash formed adjacent mountains to the snow piles people dug around the sidewalk corners, kids went whizzing down Franklin Avenue on hot magenta plastic toboggans and groups of store owners and families gathered in groups to laugh and grumble at the various activities put on hold by mother nature. The landscape of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, was drastically changed by this year’s Snowmageddon, and with it the entire culture of the neighborhood, if just for a day.

This was only my second New York snow storm, and I’m sure it’s been superseded in years past, but I couldn’t help but think about the event in terms of landscape and landscape’s quiet foundation to our pedestrian, daily lives.

I guess I’m thinking particularly of landscape in terms of cultural geography—the paths we carve out for ourselves to do what we do. In focusing on landscape in contemporary American art for my thesis, it has been revealing to look to artists for new definitions of what landscape can be and how it has been visualized. Artists like Christo/Jean Claude, Gordon Matta Clark, even James Turrell or Robert Smithson, work/ed in landscape, changing our paths, and coaxing us to look in directions different from our customary habit. The work seems to pose questions about the habits we form in landscape. Distraction sometimes becomes an element of investigation. To me, there is a close connection between these examples and the snowstorm’s aftermath.

(my painting) Landscape Letter, oil, ink-jet on canvas, 2010

My task is how to translate this way of working with landscape in painting. The pieces I showed for the midyear critiques were made with varying ‘tools of perspective’ - observational still-life on photographs. They’re fantasies in many ways, but also composed of symbols from veins in American natural and cultural history. Because much of my interest has been rooted in the landscape of the American West, I have recently been looking at the work that has come out of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, in addition to authors like Rebecca Solnit who explore the cultural history of landscape (her book, Savage Dreams, is a perfect example). Catching the recent Anselm Kiefer show at Gagosian has also provided some new food for thought on landscape-as-cultural-history.

A view from the Kiefer show at Gagosian Gallery, Chelsea

The "Post-Crit Elixer"

How to move forward after a critique.
By Catherine Howe, instructor

As one who has given and received countless critiques in the (too many to mention) years since I was in grad school myself, I would like to share with you some tips for making the most of your Thesis Project critiques.

• The most important thing I can tell you is keep is talking! Do not clam-up or shut-down/shop-for-the-holidays just yet... Talk with your fellow students. Share ideas while the experience is fresh.
• Write down the main ideas and comments that came from your critique and any questions you have about them.

So, what do I do with those ideas now?
Separate the ideas into the "macro" and the "micro"- in other words, identify the main points versus the trivial. This can be done with others if it is more fun.

1) Look through them and make a list of any structural or BIG issue comments that resonate with you but which will need to be addressed before moving on.

2) These macro issues will require some extended thought in the form of dreaming, scheming, what-if? explorations, and conversations with yourself. You may need to pull down some existing idols or get a New Year's makeover.

3) Re-visioning. Give yourself time but keep making things while you do it. The works you do while you're re-visioning can be "unimportant," and never need to see the light of day. Ask yourself questions and let the answers stew. Draw diagrams, write poems, look at paintings somewhere, read books, muse.

The "Micro" comments will be easier, if you agree something needs to change, change it.
You may have to go back to “the drawing board” in order to try something out. There’s no way to make something for the first time that isn’t, at some level, a risk. Sounds obvious, but it is hard to put new ideas/material in the middle of a work you have been laboring over. There is, however, no other way. You have to experiment, see what works, be willing to get it wrong.

4) Once you think you have something that might work, don't second guess yourself, try it!

5) Keep in constant dialogue with yourself. Do not change what does not, to your way of seeing, need changing. Do not assume that other people’s suggestions will always be the right ones to address a problem. Identify the problem underlying the suggestion and see what the "critter" inside has to say about solutions.

Catherine Howe, (detail of a work from the series, "Klytie", 2007), oil/canvas 52 x 48 in.
http://web.mac.com/catherinehowe/site/home.html

Portraits of a Crit

By Catherine Howe, instructor at the Academy
It was Sunday, 3:30 pm, December 12, the third and final day of Mid-Year Critiques at the Academy. I was sick at home, but instead of just thrashing about in a feverish "As if I could BE there" sensibility, I thought I would share some glimpses of the "Crit-ers" and the "Crit-ees" from the first two days, along with some gems I jotted down before I became senseless with flu.

A stellar cast of "Crit-ers" participated, encouraging the students and sharing critical feedback essential to their progress through their Thesis projects. Wade Schuman, Lisa Bartolozzi, Patrick Connors, John Jacobsmeyer, Vincent Desiderio, Bob Simon, Bruce Gagnier, Kurt Kauper, Harvey Citron, and Margaret Bowland were among those who shared the following insights. See if you can guess who said what...


*  *  *

On painting with a system - "...you have to turn a system into an aesthetic, it is like some contemporary jazz; it sounds like it is fun for them (the musicians), but it's not for me."

On "accuracy first" in the painting process - "Manet always started with an accurate underpainting before proceeding to simplify things. This accuracy fed his abstraction."

On the Ineffable in art - "Rodin would say that the most important part of great architecture is the part no one talks about: the AIR inside it."

An apt metaphor - "Please don't give me something that is predigested!"

On habitat - "Criticism is in the past tense and painting in the present. An artist can be imprisoned with each mark, virtually painting within that cloistered place of certainty, or the artist can paint from an observatory, where sensation defies absolute description."

On originality - "The artist must be a good parking attendant- it is usually best to back in while trying to avoid bumping into the cars of famous people."

On bad television - "All the painting tropes have been absorbed by popular culture. The artist must consider that paintings now carry the detritus of everything else."

On the monstrous - "You have to think how the parts relate to the whole, there must be an overarching idea or a system of integration or the result is nothing but an accretion."

On depth of experience - "The painter should express ideas through the paint itself: you have to take me there and make me care!"

And, finally - "Cough, sniff."

*  *  *

Landscape Lenses

by Emily Adams (MFA 2011)

Richard Diebenkorn, Ocean Park #92 (1976)

Nearing the end of the fall semester, theses are being written and paintings are being refined for December’s mid-year mark. Last year, Sir Kenneth Clark’s The Nude was a required reading by this time. To be honest, I wasn’t so terribly thrilled about the book, but I recently finished his chronicle of Western landscape painting in Landscape into Art. In the book, he devises categories for ways in which landscape has functioned in painting over time, from medieval symbol to Renaissance fact to expressions of empirical naturalism and human emotions to a parallel to the act of painting itself (twentieth century cubism and abstraction). I can’t help but reread Clark’s book with an eye on locating the place of the human figure in all of his examples, and then look around at contemporary American painters for whom ‘landscape’ is a significant subject. Where is the human figure in contemporary American landscape? Could it still be high up in a building or flying machine? Or perhaps it has moved on to be present in the very fact of its absence?

Mark Tansey, EC101 (2009) oil on canvas

Clayton Merrill, Falling (2002)

April Gornik writes that her work is of ‘unpeopled landscapes’ (aprilgornik.com). While Anselm Kiefer’s latest work continues to allude to the social history of his native Germany through the absence of the human in charred landscapes, and David Hockney has retired to British pastoral life with an LA tang, many American landscapes seem to hold on to a more Romantic view of ‘nature’ as somehow both inseparable from yet bigger than individual or collective human activity. Many seem to be 'unpeopled,' but the people are still hidden within image, implied by the perspective taken, or implicated in the artist's process itself.

Vija Celmins, Untitled (Desert), (1971) Lithograph

As I gather together my work from the semester, I'm beginning to realize that the absence of the human figure is at the heart of where I'm going. I've been trying to incorporate still-life and landscape to make paintings that are essentially about humans, without humans. In the meantime, I will continue to compile and analyze my list of contemporary-American-unpeopled-landscape-paintings. Studio work updates coming soon...

My ideas have changed, changed, and changed again...

by Aliene de Souza Howell (MFA 2011)
My ideas have changed, changed, and changed again. I have had much trouble trying to transfer the efficaciousness of my Germany mixed media works on paper into oil paintings or 3-dimensional pieces. After making a successful mock diorama I attempted to make a much larger 3-dimensional one that was an almost unqualified disaster. I also was working on a large oil painting of the same subject which has been slow and very naughty. It is currently in a time-out in my studio, facing the corner.

HOWEVER, I began working on a new totally unrelated painting of my cousin and had a fantastic and invigorating critique from my painting teacher, Margaret Bowland. Margaret was immediately disposed towards the portrait of my cousin I had been working on. She called me out on being a tormented artist and said how often when you have a natural aptitude for something you can take it for granted. And she was right, the supermarket painting felt forced. I was able to transfer the knowledge I gained from experimenting in Germany with different levels of transparency and opacity in my painting. Some areas are exposed underpainting and some are built up with wax medium.

Trial and error. Being a complete genius and nincompoop. A day (an hour?) in the studio. To quote e.e. cummings, "An artist, a man, a failure, must proceed."

The class I'm taking, Narrative Printmaking, is excellent. We did 20-minute presentations about what narrative printmaking means to us which were both informative and enlightening. I focused on Max Klinger (a Leipziger!) and Leonard Baskin mostly, and ended up with a lot of fresh inspiration. Although I went from Animal Farm to a Chinatown Umbrella story to my imagination and finally landed on a book of poetry, Thomas and Beulah, by Rita Dove, I picked up something with each incarnation. I had not done any printmaking in years and I have fallen in love with it all over again.

And I am outrageously excited about my Master Class with Jenny Saville this coming weekend!! The opportunity to take this class with her is one of the many reasons I came to the Academy and it is here!

Hot Air Balloon

by Emily D. Adams (MFA 2011)
Paradise is the Persian word for Garden. Its literal translation is a ‘walled enclosure,’ and has been handed down from sometime around 4000 BCE through the Egyptians and the Moors, to the Spanish medieval cloister and the Italian Renaissance, changing in styles and scope like the English Gardenesque, the botanical, and the mighty National Park. With all its otherworldly connotations, it’s interesting to me that the origin of the word, paradise, and the history of the garden, imply a human hand in the creation of these spaces.


study, oil on paper

study, oil on paper

In preparation for my thesis, I am developing work that explores the theme of the garden through different configurations of aerial landscape photos and floral still-life. I’ve also been painting from film stills of singing women — a seemingly disconnected endeavor that will hopefully evolve in tandem.

In Vincent Desiderio’s painting seminar, we will be watching films by the great Soviet filmmaker, Andrei Tarkovsky. In the opening to his Passion According to Andre Rublev, a young man escapes from the roof of a church in a hot air balloon. As viewers, we are shown the aerial perspective of 15th century Russian landscape. It is a view, unthinkable for the time the film portrays, that returns throughout the movie as a metaphor, perhaps, for the perspective the artist is able to reach through his wild creative faith. But his faulty technological innovation, the hot air balloon, brings him crashing down after a brief moment of escape from the earthen world.

The scene reminds me of Daumier’s lithograph of Nadar flying above Paris in a hot air balloon, taking photos from the sky. Below the image, he writes ‘Nadar, elevating photography to the height of art’. If I’m not mistaken, Nadar’s were the first aerial photos ever taken, the second cousin thrice removed of Google Earth. While Daumier’s caricature may be a cranky prod at the day’s new media, I wonder if the artist himself might not be just a little bit moved by images of ‘space-ship earth’ and the capillary system that brings the Seine from the Alps, through Paris, to the English Channel.

For reference, I’m looking at my collection of airplane photos—all those grids and circles of American farmland—and wondering how I might translate them into paintings, and why. And, speaking of lithography, I’m also exploring the aluminum plate in John Jacobsmeyer’s printmaking class as another substrate for farms and flowers. Agricultural fields seem to be just another addition to the lineage of gardens; but then, farmland can also be considered a contemporary paradise, in keeping with the etymology. They’re a lot like roses: common, maybe taken for granted, a static image of something that has been changing with human innovations for quite a while now.

study, oil/ink-jet print on canvas

Action, and Traction

by Aliene de Souza Howell (MFA 2011)

Self-portrait, Till Fog and Clear of Midnight



The life of an industrious artist trying to make something of herself requires a lot of back and forth! But all good things, I was in a show with two other artists in Philadelphia. The exhibit opened Saturday evening at the Mural Arts Program's gallery. I showed the work I made in Leipzig in addition to a self-portrait I made during my first year at the Academy. There was a brief and only mildly nerve-racking Q and A session for each artist after we were introduced by the director of Philadelphia's Knapp Gallery. I was completely humbled when he introduced my work as "somewhere between Eric Fischl and Ceaser Chavez."

The thesis project has been challenging. Caught between conflicting critiques since my last post, I have been oscillating between different artistic paths and wrestling over what I believed in and what resonated the most with my work. I think the best decisions come from plain trial and error and sometimes you just have to buck up and fail in order to move on and make better pieces. So I tried to work it out instead of paralyzing myself with anxiety/indecision. I made another diorama with perspectival suggestions from Vincent Desiderio. And after testing out the antithetical ideas from the aforementioned conflicting critiques, I decided to combine them. One critic suggested I pursue large scale paintings in lieu of the dioramas and another was very gung-ho for them. So, I am projecting my dioramas onto canvas and painting from them. This way I can keep the linear dynamism of the drawing and the spatial relationships without giving up the purity of painting.



New Diorama with Desiderio suggestions!



For Narrative Printmaking, the idea for the class is to create one sequential story throughout the semester. After deliberating over different books, poems, etc and making lots of drawings, I ended up deciding to come up with my own story. The narrator will privilege a Chinatown umbrella as the leading protagonist. The story will follow its path from first finding an owner, through different adventures inside and out, and then breaking and being washed away in the gutter. This was inspired from the solid week of rain we had in New York recently and the countless broken umbrellas littering the street.

A bright spot last week was Alexi Worth's lecture. He is one of the artists that delivers a complete experience; he creates images that exist in their own fully-formed world. He told us about making storyboards to prepare the narratives for his compelling paintings which would explain the pathos his figures evoke. The compositions include the viewer as part of the picture, which is something I have just started to think about myself.

And I can't wait to hear what Odd Nerdrum has to say this week!

Another week into the semester, ideas are action.

by Aliene de Souza Howell (MFA 2011)
I re-incarnated a piece from Leipzig about a business man walking past a flooded city street into a mock-up diorama. I also did a drawing for the next in my series of catastrophe meets quotidian, incorporating the Guatemalan sinkhole into a supermarket scene. For my Thesis, I am launching into a new endeavor, testing out an idea that has been formulating for years in the back of head and has finally sprung out like Athena from Zeus.

diorama for business/flood

Combining my love of theatre/opera/film with my passion for painting, I aim to turn my paintings into a life size diorama. A walk-in art world somewhere between Red Grooms and William Kentridge. After speaking with my advisor, I was opened up to even more possibilities in terms of scale and materials. Transparency verse opacity--plexiglass or wood. Intimacy verse Impact.

I am anticipating updating my website with images from my Thesis and other Academy work! Academy alum Nic Rad is giving a series of lunchtime lectures about getting your work online and accessible to all. My previous computer was stolen along with all the software I had to update my website and Nic is going to show us how to use cloud computing and keep all files online. I am very excited about this.

sketch for supermarket/sinkhole

Hilary Harkness recently gave a stimulating lecture about her work as part of the ongoing Art & Culture Lecture series. I was impressed with the world she had created for herself within her paintings. When she spoke colloquially regarding the history, location, and narrative of the figures and spaces in each piece it seemed more like she was speaking as a novelist or documentarian. Every aspect of the Bosch-like energy in her paintings was considered and related to each other.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling "Kilroy was here" on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass