Date of Award

Spring 6-2-2018

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Department

Painting

First Advisor

Kevin Zucker

Second Advisor

Jackie Gendel

Third Advisor

Roger White

Abstract

I draw people and paint things. Sometimes I paint people and draw things, but mostly I draw people and paint things. I work from life. The process – painting or drawing – is not mediated. That is the primary fact concerning the current work.

I see a mediator as anything forced in between a subject and myself. Following that, the work doesn’t involve Internet searches or photography or printing or projection or tracing or elaborate set ups or still lives or prep drawing or under painting.

The current work is defined by the current context: a graduate school art studio environment. An outcome – successful or not – is a result of a human interaction. Lived and remembered. This takes the work in two directions.

Paintings involve a looking process drawn out over months. The details layer with time and a painting gathers like dust. This needs constant engagement with a very still object and results in an image of something in the studio. It’s emotional.

Drawings are conversational. Graduate students can’t sit for too long and the drawings are minimal. This is an opportunity to emphasize seeing, not the outcome image. An immediate search for detail in a half-hour period as opposed to details building up in weeks. Details here are whatever visibly makes a person who they are. I think about the difference between a genuine line and an unnecessary one. A genuine one is sensed and the other is contrived. I don’t know what that means.

I once couldn’t draw to save my life and the woman I love told me to feel the line.

I can’t feel the line.

Included in

Painting Commons

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