Date of Award
Spring 5-30-2020
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
Printmaking
First Advisor
Andrew Raftery
Second Advisor
Kate McNamara
Abstract
As I stood by my car, I kept coming back to the phrase. It is more difficult to hit a moving target. This time, it was not just a passing platitude. I thought more. Just as it is more difficult to intentionally hit a moving target, a moving target is simultaneously more difficult to intentionally miss. It might be easier to hit a moving target if what one is really trying to do is miss it. Isn’t this why car accidents happen? People hit the thing they are by all means trying to avoid. Everyone is in motion and despite mostly going in the same direction, a collision. This may be common sense, but it left me wondering how someone still managed to hit my parked car. It became clear, he was not looking.
Artmaking feels like it can parallel one of these concepts. Not an accident I try to avoid or a target I try to hit; rather, it is like shooting high and far in the direction I want a target to be and then sprinting along the trajectory to plant the target before arrow meets earth. Archers draw their arrows. Artists draw their targets, sometimes still managing to miss the mark (I know I do). It is this state of simultaneity that interests me. How to be simultaneously precise and nondescript? I ask this question often. I thought the 5 more I wrote it in my notebook, the better I would know what I really meant by it.
Recommended Citation
Trotta, McKinzie, "How to be simultaneously precise and nondescript" (2020). Masters Theses. 497.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/497
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.