(Very) Rough Draft of Thesis Painting

Alright, so here we have our prodigal son/Icarus amalgamation crawling out of his melted wings to mourn the loss.

The color scheme will be very similar to Rembrandt's dreary tone but here, the white feathers and melted wax will stand out over his dark floor with a dim glow. The son is wearing a black business suit.

I'm going to need to find a model so the foreshortening on the son doesn't look so bizarre. I'm also 95% decided that I should include an infant crawling through the feathers.

Work in progress...

My thesis project isn't going to be made with Microsoft Paint. My digital camera was acting up, and then the batteries died. Serves it right.

Anyway, I've been thinking about what Viktor said, and scrapped a few ideas. I wish I could have seen him and the rest of the group today to get feedback, but without further delay, my work in progress...

Critique At Livingston

The group critique at the LAB allowed us to see the progress on some of the larger-scale projects that can't be moved to the CSB, as well as an update on the smaller projects that are able to be transported.

It's good to see that everyone is really putting a lot of thought into these art pieces. There are some very inspired designs that once explained, become very interesting.

Group Critique 2

I re-did my triptych idea so it would have less narrative but still express the same idea. Everyone hated it. Now I hate it. My next draft will be a one-painting affair.

Also, since I didn't put in a blog entry for last week responding to the crit the other presenters had, I'll just slip a comment in here. To the people who presented last week: You all had some inspired ideas.

Group Critique

I got to show my group and Viktor the idea I'm working on. It's a triptych of how we leave behind ideals as we go through life, and in our old age look back to see we didn't get much out of our compromised lives. It's told by paintings of one man's experience, but is hopefully flexible enough to be relatable.

Viktor decided the triptych had too much narrative, and the meaning of the piece became obvious too quickly. My peers seemed to like what I was doing. I appreciated what my group had to say as well as Viktor's feedback. If I had to choose between the two, I'd rather have my piece seem too obvious than seem like an unintelligible mess (which I feel like I could make too easily). I'll try different changes and see if I like one.

2009 First Year BFA Exhibition Review

I have to say that I'm not usually one who likes photography, but I must praise Betsy VanLangen's set of photos for stealing the show. Burnt cigarettes around the neck like a noose, covered in the tape ripped out of a cassette, contoured by paint or simply impaling a cherry pie with her tongue, each photograph has a composition that pulls you in, and an atmosphere with just enough mystery to keep you hypnotized.



A piece that caught my interest, for reasons I couldn't find by the time I had to move on, was John Amelchenko's "Anticipated Nostalgia Who Who Leaves Unnamed [sic.]" It's a work of simply two black triangles with some transparent drapery hanging over, but for whatever reason I kept thinking about it while walking around the exhibit.




Another work that attracted me was (tentatively, I hope) labeled "KAM: Bottles and Bones." These were interesting sculptures designed to look like configurations of bones, and then painted white. The underside of these forms were painted in vibrant color, as to deflect colored light outward onto the white base they were set on. It made for a subtle effect.





I want to mention Erik Schoonebeek's "Feel the Wall" simply for the presense it had. It did not, unfortunately, have enough command to make me actually feel the wall.









Eileen Behnke had a very fleshy look to the characters in her painting "The Things You Do For Love." These characters are apparently from a reality TV show, and I guess they are competing for love. They are all so sickly looking and so unnatractive in this painting that I find their run-down appearance to match the brushy style of painting so appropriately. I think they're supposed to be glorious and we're supposed to envy them, but the painting makes them look like they're at death's door.


There was a gigantic painting on the far wall, noted only as "Put Label Here." It's a huge canvas, not completely covered in paint, not even covered in gesso. It's paint on a huge canvas, but the brush strokes have so much vigor and energy across the huge breadth of space that you feel the artist exhausted themself just finishing a line.






Overall, I have to say that this show had a lot of good entries, and a lot of entries that just meant absolutely nothing. A few paintings seemed like they were stolen from highschool students. The curation was all over the place, but the best pieces of the show didn't suffer for it. The best held their own, while the secondary pieces sunk into the abyss of obscurity.

MFA Programs:

If I were interested in an MFA, I'd probably head out to New York since once I'd go broke I'll need to be by family...

• Colombia - (pricey, but famous faculty and you get what you pay for)
  
• Pratt - (supposed to be great for computer graphics)
  
• Hunter College - (best deal in NYC price-wise)
  
• NYU - (they seem to be giving attention to their fine-arts program)
  
• SVA - (great location, focus on illustration)
  

...but I'm tired of spending tons of money in short amounts of time and won't be pursuing a Masters Degree.