Abstract
Purpose: Near the end of my last semester, I took a painting class and painted portraits from life for the first time. Before this, I had worked portraits mainly from photographs. I found intriguing, how much I could get to know a person and how much more that person became real through painting their image from life. There is a certain chemistry that happens between the sitter and the painter that I experienced and found interesting. I spent this semester exploring my family through portraiture. I have tried to capture them in their own intimate moments that reveal not only their character, but also their relationship to me. I find that this is something that I've needed to do in my life and in my art. I haven't spoken with my biological family since my father passed away over twelve years ago and there is little sense of family in my life right now. I believe this study helped me to become more in touch with the family that I do have through my spouse, and give me a sense of closure. In addition to this, but not nearly as important, I feel that this study will help to prepare me for full-time work as an artist / teacher once I leave the military.
This document covers my most recent studio art study in the ADP titled, Face Value: An Intimate View of Family Through Portraiture. I look at artists who painted family members and close friends during their careers: John Singer Sargent, Mary Cassatt, Manet, Rembrandt, and Chuck Close. The study was divided into four areas. The first area is primarily toward Sargent and his portraiture. In the second area, I moved toward Mary Cassatt and her portrayal of family, infants, and images of women and how they influenced my own painting and views of my own family. The third area was dominated by the color theories of Robert Henri and experimentation with my own color. The last and final area contained a mixture of studying Chuck Close's works along with a return to Sargent.
The appendix contains artwork produced over the course of the semester. This is only about half of the entire output during my study. In the middle of my study, I destroyed a majority of the work I had produced up to that point. The artwork remaining and what I produced after, is what is available. This appendix includes copies of sketchbook drawings, paintings, photos of artwork, etc. There is also a copy of a fundamental graphics text that involved part of my time during the study, but was also influenced by the study, so it is included here.
Face Value: An Intimate View of Family Through Portraiture.
Something unusual happened to me after completing five semesters at ADP. I arrived at the beginning of the last residency with little idea of what I wanted to do for my culminating study. I knew that I wanted to do another art-related study, but wasn't sure exactly where to go with it. I had just finished a two-semester study of Pre-Raphaelite art and was very tired of that period of in art history. I wanted something new, but not so different that I couldn't relate to it. After a few days at the residency, an idea came to me when I went to Bear Pond Books and found a book entitled Interpreting Sargent by Elizabeth Prettejohn. I had always been an admirer of John Singer Sargent's work and thought that this might be the avenue for me to take with my culminating study. I had all of my requirements, especially math, out of the way and was open to study pretty much anything I wanted. What was additionally thrilling about studying Sargent's life and work was that the largest exhibition of his work since his death was going to be held from February 21, 1999 to May 31, 1999 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., an old stomping ground.
In relation to stumbling upon Interpreting Sargent, I also attended an oil painting class last semester that influenced my decision to do family portraits this study. The class focused mainly on portraiture and I discovered that painting from a live model was much more rewarding and exhilarating for me than painting from a photograph. I experienced a unique bond between the sitter and myself that is obviously not present when I paint from photographs. Also while attending the painting class, another student brought in a painting that she was working on at home and she wanted the class's opinion on it. The painting was of her teenage daughter sitting on a couch while watching TV. What I found striking about the portrait was that it was not a portrait in the traditional sense of showing just the figure in a posed, bust, three-quarter, or full-length accompanied by props. This was a portrait that showed part of the sitter's everyday life. The woman in the class had accomplished painting a small window into an everyday occurrence in her life. She had taken the ordinary and immortalized it in art. I spoke to the woman about her painting and she was flattered that I admired it. I asked how she was able to get her daughter to pose and she said that her daughter enjoyed it. What I find really interesting was that her daughter wasn't really posing at all for the painting, but was just going through a normal, everyday routine.
Excited by my experience during the class, I wanted to attempt to paint my own family and close friends in their natural environments to see if through my painting process, I could come closer to them. Some of my background is required here in order to make full sense of my intentions for this study. Aside from my wife's family, I have no close family at all. My mother passed away when I was thirteen, my father when I was eighteen. I haven't spoken with the remaining members of my biological family in over twelve years since my father's passing. I have no idea where the remainder of my family is located now and haven't thought much about finding them until lately.
I grew up in a turbulent household, being raised by two alcoholics. Both my mother and father were excessive drinkers and when my mom passed away, my father's drinking grew increasingly worse. His drinking became so bad that my five half-sisters and one half-brother, who are much older than I am, shunned him by staying away most of the time and rarely ever visiting. I was ashamed of what my father was and never invited friends over to my house for fear that they would find out or that he might do something foolish in front of them. I felt trapped and alone during my adolescent years due to my father's drinking. My father and I had nothing in common, so going to baseball or football games, playing catch, talking about girls, or going to the movies were out of the question with him. All he was interested in was that half-pint of Carstairs (a brand of whiskey I remember all too well) in the kitchen cabinet. I made certain that I was out of the house as soon as I got home from school because my father went through an odd metamorphosis when I went to school. In the morning, he was the greatest dad you could have. He'd get up and cook either a fried baloney sandwich or scrambled eggs with sausage for me, help me pack my lunch, and see me off to school. By the time I got home, he was an entirely different person. He'd curse or threaten me as soon as I walked in the door. Well, that depended if he was awake or not. If he were asleep, I'd stick around a little longer to get something to eat before he woke up (I'm getting images of Jack and the sleeping giant too vividly in my mind right now). I'd get out of the house as soon I could when I got home from school and would go to my friend Rob's house and stay until it was time to go home and go to bed. It got so bad that Rob's mom began setting a place for me at the dinner table because she knew I'd be there like clockwork everyday.
After my father passed away, I moved in with my sister for a month. She was going through divorce at the time and was, like my father, drinking all the time and coming in at two or three in the morning, waking up the neighborhood. How did I ever get caught up in this? Did I deserve this type of life? These are questions I began to ask myself. After a huge argument with my sister over something as petty as a television, she kicked me out and Rob's parents let me live with them. I spent the majority of my time with them when my father was alive, but for some reason the transition for me, to live with them, was large. I felt that I was imposing all the time and found it entirely different living there, rather than just visiting as I had before. I stayed with them for a year and a half and finished high school with honors, perfect attendance, and a scholarship to the Maryland Institute, College of Art; three feats that I'm quite proud of considering my circumstances.
After about a semester of going to the Maryland Institute, Rob's mom said that I had to get a place of my own. It was time to grow up and move on. The question was, where? I was working at a local sub shop making just enough to buy food for myself and art supplies for school. Needless to say, I was out on the street, living illegally in my friend's dorm rooms at art school. After about two months of odds and ends jobs in the city and moving from friend to friend, I joined the Army and moved to Ft. Knox, Kentucky.
After meeting my wife Barbie six years ago, her family welcomed me immediately and they became my adopted family. Her father treats me like a son and tells me often that, "I'm the son he never had." Her cousin, brother-in-law, and I are good friends and go to ball games and do other things together. Her aunt and uncle treat me great and make me feel like a part of the family. I think my original intentions in this study were, through art, to get closer to this family and Rob's family, or the family that I haven't seen in twelve years.
Having some of my background discussed, I can move toward the actual study. I've always been a huge fan of John Singer Sargent's work, but never really study him in depth. I figured that this study would be the one where I went all out on studying one of my favorite painters. This fascination of Sargent and his work was confirmed when he appeared in a dream that I had during a previous study. I immediately awoke after the dream and recorded it in m journal. The following is that dream:
I had another dream last night. This one begins at my friend Pete Varisano's house where we're in a deep conversation about art. I tell him about a new teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art named John Singer Sargent. Pete said he already heard of him and didn't like him because of his way of handling students. Apparently, Sargent and Pete had gotten into an argument over his art. Sargent had told Pete that his art lacked finish.
I got into my car and decided to go to the academy myself to meet this infamous Sargent. At the academy, which was located on a beach, I saw an old man in overalls carrying a bright red sign that read, "Don't pick these flowers under penalty of law, EPA." The odd thing was that there wasn't a flower in sight. He walked out into the wide stretch of beach and proceeded to pound the sign deep into the sand. After this, he walked past me without a word, back into the academy.The eerie part in all of this was that the atmosphere here on this beach was very similar to that in an Edward Hopper painting. It was very bleak and cold looking despite the warm sun that bathed everything in an alien light. The academy itself was a boxy-type of building like something that Frank Lloyd Wright would have designed with a large area in front separated into sections by stone benches. There didn't seem to be any trees within sight of the academy let alone grass. Everything was sand and tall stalks of bamboo.
Coming out of the academy was a man dressed in an extremely white suit that blinded me to look at. The man was wearing a wide-brimmed hat similar to the ones worn in barbershop quartets. Around his neck he wore a black bow tie that was covered by a neatly trimmed beard. On his face, perched on the end of his nose, was a thin pair of wire-rim glasses.
Before the man approached me, I knew who he was. He introduced himself in a thick English accent, "Good afternoon lad, allow me to introduce myself. My name is John Singer Sargent, Head of the Painting Department at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art. What is yours?" Finding my station in life small in comparision to his, I meekly answered, "Gene Snyder, Combat Army Artist, I will soon be teaching art for the Army." He replied in a fascinated voice, "Ah, another one! I'm fond of lads like you. Do you realize you fall in line with many artists that painted war. War is a part of life as life is a part of war. War is history and if you paint history, you paint life. That fellow American Winslow Homer, he painted it. Rubens painted it. Goya painted it. Delacroix painted it. Even I've done a few for a brief time. Why there's even one doing it now, what is his name? Picasso? He's doing it! Don't be ashamed of what you do. Do you think I enjoyed painting for all those snobbish good-for-nothings in England? No. It's what's in here that counts." He said, as he pointed to my chest. "Would you care to accompany me for a walk? We can discuss your future plans at the academy."
Walking toward the beach, I remembered that I hadn't brought all of my tubes and paintbrushes with me. In an alarmed voice I told Sargent of my dilemma. He responded in a calm voice, "Don't worry, you left those tubes and brushes for a reason. Limitation is the means to invention my good fellow!." Right after this, I woke up.
After having this dream, I felt that I had a close bond to Sargent and his work. I had liked his work before, but after the dream, I felt like I knew him personally or that he had given me guidance. It was and odd feeling and it felt right to study him this semester, especially after my find at Bear Pond Books.
The book that heightened my interest in John Singer Sargent and portraiture was, as I mentioned earlier, Interpreting Sargent by Elizabeth Prettejohn. I was so charged by this book, that I had finished it during my twelve-hour train ride home from school. I found the book incredibly interesting and couldn't believe how quickly my attitude had changed toward Sargent's work. The main point of the book was to illustrate that Sargent was more than just a painter of slick, shallow portraits. Sargent is often accused of covering the social issues of his day with masterful brushwork and brilliant surface in his artwork. Prettejohn's book unravels these notions of Sargent's trade of psychological and social depth for surface quality in his paintings. Prettejohn had moved Sargent from my previously viewed confines of "safe portrait artist" to a social interpreter of the English upper class. She pointed out that there are many works in which Sargent's blurs the line between tradition and avant-garde. Sargent's portraits hint at many issues on all levels of society. From his commentary on the women's liberation movement to the disintegration of the English upper class, Sargent was able to take his views and force them into commissioned works. In this regard, Sargent had it made; he was able to voice his feelings, opinions, and attitudes at the monetary expense of someone else. Each sitter that posed for their portrait became his prey, open for anything that he had to say about them in paint. His portraits were in such high demand that he often dictated when the sitter would pose, which is totally the opposite of practice today where the artist is subservient to the sitter's wishes. I found that Prettejohn, in addition to the above, points out that the idea of a portrait being a psychological profile is a new art history concept. It was not until the beginning of the century that artists consciously intended to paint with this in mind. This information puts Sargent's work in a whole new perspective for me. Although his portraits are stylish, slick, and tasteful, they are also engaging. His portraits force the viewer to look at the sitter and, in looking at them, the sitter beyond what he or she is. He is similar to Rembrandt, a predecessor to the psychological portrait.
Another book that was a cornerstone to my study of Sargent and gave me more respect for the artist was Sargent at Broadway: The Impressionist Years. This book is a compilation of three essays by Stanley Olson, Warren Adelson, and Richard Ormond. I found this book defending Sargent by showing his "other work" aside from portraiture.
It shows the many branches of Sargent's painting that not only establishes him as an experimental artist, but also something more than just a portrait painter. Sargent was constantly floating between Impressionism with Monet at Giverny, the Victorian painters in England, and traditional painting. Like Degas, Sargent held a strong respect for traditional art and at the same time was influenced by many of his contemporaries. I believe my attraction to these artists is because I am very much like them in that I know and respect past art, yet I want to do something new that is based on it, but doesn't adhere exactly to it. I want to put my own twist on it.
What I found was that by looking at Sargent's portraits in a different light, I was beginning to see my own work differently as well. Instead of trying to capture the person that I was painting, I wanted to say more than just a portrait would say. I experimented with this and painted a few portraits of Barbie doing things that she would normally be doing around the house. I was satisfied with some of the results but the time involved caused it to be a burden on Barbie to pose for long periods of time.
There were many areas in the book, where Prettejohn explains Sargent's training in France with the artist Carlous Duran, that I found interesting. Carlous Duran painted totally the opposite of other successful painters of his time. Rather than in long sessions that required meticulous applications of paint in layers or glazes, Duran painted in large areas of flat tone that were pieced together to get the overall tonality established in the painting first. Duran was an avid student of Velasquez and it is evident in both his and Sargent's work. Following this style of painting, I tried to paint in this manner and found it very easy to get the illusion of depth. It seems that tonality is the backbone in many of Sargent's paintings. Looking closer at his work, I can see how he places the areas of greatest contrast next to the main area of interest. Following Sargent's lead, I tried this and found that it was much faster and the picture came together much quicker. I used this technique to paint a few paintings in oil and watercolor of Barbie sitting on the couch watching television. These turned out well and I was glad to see that Barbie was more relaxed by being able to move every once in a while as I painted. I wasn't going for an exact copy of what I saw in these, but more of an impression or mood of the scene. If a feature or shape was off, it was fine. I've always struggled with a balance between high amounts of detail and loose painting. I think that there is a point in each piece where I have to find a stopping point. I'm getting more familiar with knowing when that time is and find that it is getting easier to stop and let a painting stand as a painting instead of working it to death.
The second phase of my study involved looking at Mary Cassatt's work. I believe my attraction to Cassatt's work grew during this part of the study due to circumstances that were happening in my life at the time. After being married for five years, Barbie and I decided last year that it was time that we started to try and have children. After Barbie had two surgeries to remove blockage from her fallopian tubes, our doctor finally gave Barbie and I the green light to try. The doctor did warn us of a very possible chance that Barbie might have a tubule pregnancy. The doctor was correct and that was what indeed happened. We were both greatly upset and had difficulty emotionally dealing with what was occurring in our lives. It was at this time that I had begun to read the few books that I had about Mary Cassatt. Immediately, I found her work mesmerizing. Cassatt is well known for her portrayal of modern women and infants and these images were a beacon to me that I couldn't resist. She is the counterpoint to Degas; whom I also admire greatly. I find her work to be very real in the sense that she is describing life in her paintings. Unlike Sargent, there is nothing extra or flamboyant about her work. The work says everything through saying very little. There are no extras or add-ons to distract the viewer from the focal point of the work. She has successfully taken life and broken it down into its most common denominator. Her use of composition is fantastic in that she fragments the canvas into areas of flat color that are perfectly balanced. Following Cassatt's lead, I began painting a series of oil paintings of my twenty-month old niece. I found these paintings to be relaxing and to gradually ease the pain of recent events. I particularly like a painting that I did of my niece riding a wooden horse. The composition and colors are similar to Cassatt's. The painting is painted in very loosely painted brushstrokes with little attention to details. I felt extremely comfortable painting this. There was nothing at stake here. It seems that my reasons for painting were slowly evolving from painting what I thought I should be painting, to painting what I wanted to paint. Unaware of what was happening, my motives for painting were changing. I was finally moving from a reactive artist to a proactive artist. I wasn't painting something that someone else wanted me to paint, but was painting for the enjoyment of painting. This was a huge step forward for me yet there was something there that was unresolved. I've grown very close to Cassatt's work through painting like her and find that the subject matter of her paintings transcends time. This is what is so appealing about her work. From her work, my work grew and in the process, I was able to better handle the situation the Barbie and I were in.
Around the time of the third mailing, I grew totally disgusted with the study and discarded everything aside from the portraits of my niece and a few paintings of Barbie. I destroyed practically everything that I had produced up to this point in the study. I was disappointed in what I had completed thus far and thought that the idea of painting family was a huge mistake. I tore canvases, broke stretcher bars, and ripped up drawings. Something was eating at me inside. Something was saying that what I was doing up to that point was futile and useless. I felt like I was standing at the end of a long, dark tunnel looking into the distance to see a small speck of light that was supposed to be my goal. The feeling I had was an odd mixture of pain and relief. I felt pain from the rejection of my family and yet felt relief in that I wasn't confined to what I was painting earlier. It was an odd period of growth and readjustment for me. I was throwing out the old and opening myself to the new. There is a part of me that thinks that by trying to tap into my feeling towards family, I set off a reaction in myself that was saying it might not be time right now. It has been an extremely long time since I've seen or heard from anyone in my family and part of me likes it that way. There is another side of me that wants to see my family. To see how their lives are going. To see their reactions to how I've changed and grown. There is also a small hint of a bitter voice saying, "See I made it without your help" in there as well. I think that sometimes my overwhelming pride and independence get in the way of what I'm really feeling and it is this struggle internally that causes me to act the way I do.
Another factor is that during this part of my study, I was completing the final draft of a drawing and color theory textbook for students at the school where I teach. I teach basic graphics for the military at the Defense Information School located at Ft. Meade, Maryland and I volunteered to write the book in order to replace the awful book that we were presently using. Due to the urgency of getting this book to the printer, my supervisors at work wanted it completed in the least amount of time possible. This hastened schedule led me to work on it many nights at home rather than on my study and I think this is partly to blame for my growing lack of interest in the study. Since the book was written on information that I learned in previous studies, and whatever its negative impact on this study, I've included it in the appendix section. In addition to this, I was taking extremely intense computer graphics classes at work and found myself drifting further away from fine arts and my study altogether. I was studying at home constantly for these classes and found little time to continue my study on portraiture. This, accompanied by my family's reaction to my painting their portraits, almost destroyed my study.
After a month-long delay, I started to work again. I had kept up with the readings, but hadn't touched a paintbrush or pencil in a month. I set out to work on the portraits of my niece again and quickly grew tired and bored of that. The spark still wasn't there. Fortunately, I came across a book about Robert Henri that refueled the fires. In a book titled, My People: The Portraits of Robert Henri, I found both a link to a past study and a way to free myself from the boredom of painting portraits for which I had little inspiration.
Henri was an American painter and member of the Ashcan school that painted genre scenes of New York's inner city during the turn of the century. I had taken an interest in Henri's work after reading, The Art Spirit, which is collection of quotes and theories from the artist collected from letters and notes taken during his teachings at the Art Student's League in New York. In My People: The Portraits of Robert Henri, I made a discovery that I found to be both exciting and exhilarating. Hidden towards the end of the book, I found a section on Henri's color and composition theories. I wasn't aware that Henri was deeply involved in color theory and had developed several different palettes, charts, and diagrams that mapped color to his liking. What I found really exciting were his experiments with color and music. Henri, along with Hardesty Gillmore Marrata, another painter and color theorist, had invented color palettes that corresponded to the twelve musical tones. My source of excitement from this find was due to a previous study dealing with color theory and the Impressionists. Being a guitar player, I am already familiar with keys, notes, and harmonies. Adding to this, the parallel between color and music was unbelievable! Henri had the entire system mapped out. In a chapter of the book on Henri's color and compositional theory, I found charts drawn by Henri that illustrated his experiments on creating a link between the color wheel and the Circle of Fifths in music theory. What was thrilling about this find was that I was trying to invent my own color harmonies using musical harmony as an aid. In Henri's writings, I found the answer to a question that I had asked over three semesters earlier. With this newly found information, I began to paint again with added excitement.
Although my find was great, I felt that it needed to be more detailed and expanded, so I set out to work by repeatedly painting color swatches and matching different color codes to one another. I found that Henri started with red, which he imagined to be "C" or the root of C major, around which most music is formulated. I found a twist to this in that if you took red ("C"), and transposed it, you'd get an entirely different color harmony. By moving red ("C") up to orange ("D"), you get a new feeling from the color harmony that is similar to the change in mood while listening to music.
In the example below, the root note or key of "C" is red as in Henri's theory. If you look closely at the first column on the chart, you will see the chord C major is comprised of the notes C, E, G and correspond to the primary colors on the color wheel.
The D major chord in music is comprised of the notes D, F#, and A. This translated into the color wheel would be Orange as the dominate or root and Green and Blue-Violet as harmonizing colors. However, the notes for a D minor chord are D, F, and A. (Flattened 3rd). This would translate into Orange as the dominant or root color harmonized with Yellow-Green and Blue-Violet. The difference between these two color "chords" is that Green, in the major color chord is stronger and more balanced between Orange and Blue-Violet. However, in the minor color chord, the minor 3rd, in this case Yellow green, tends to move toward Orange and away from Blue-Violet on the color wheel, causing a slight imbalance between the colors.
Experimenting with these color patterns was an enjoyable and considerably less stressful experience than previous parts in my study. I had finally found a hook around which I could spin at least the remainder of my study. An old love of color theory was alive again in myself and it showed in my work from this point on in my study. This also brought a sense of closure to an open study that I'd left undone for over four semesters.
Near the end of the study, I became aware of other more modern artists such as Chuck Close, Lucien Freud, and Francis Bacon. I was especially impressed by Close's work and was able to see an exhibition of his work at the Hirshhorn gallery in Washington D.C. During the study, I had originally intended to paint my family from life in their natural environment but ran into a problem when they did not make themselves available to paint! To solve this problem, as I mentioned before, I took pictures of them in their natural environment. After about two paintings, I got bored with this and re-photographed the entire family. I think Chuck Close influenced me in the way I photographed my family at this point, because instead of photographing them in their natural environments, I took large, close-up shots that were rather unsettling and very posed
The next and final phase in my study occurred very close, almost too close to the end of my study. Excusing the pun, I happened to run across a book on Chuck Close's work while I was at the Martin Luther King library in Washington D.C. I was already familiar with his work from an exhibition that was held at the Hirshhorn gallery last year. After thumbing through the book and repeatedly looking at the collection of photos of his work, I was amazed by how much work he has produced and the immense scale. What is inspirational to me is that he produced a majority of these works while confined to a wheelchair.
I think that during this part of my study, Close rubbed off on me because I began to work again, but this time it was serious work. I began a series of portraits of Barbie's family from photos that I had taken at family gatherings. Like Close, I took these photos at an unusually and uncomfortably close point of view and really zoomed-in on the features of the face. In an odd way, I went anti-Sargent on the paintings I did from these and followed unconsciously what I saw in the Close paintings. I cropped the portraits so that only the face was visible with little negative space and background around the face. The faces are about twice-life size and have the most obnoxious colors in the backgrounds. I was tired of painting dark backgrounds with heads half in shadow and half in light so I used the camera to flatten the image of the face with a frontal flash where there is little shadow in each portrait. This frontal lighting, coupled with the bright backgrounds gives these portraits an unusually flat effect that I like. They are something totally different for me to be painting especially since I'm not being overly critical about getting every detail into each face in spite of their size.
The rate at which I was working on these was astounding! Influenced by reading about Robert Henri and in part by Close's work, I painted in loud, bright, and fully saturated colors. During this I took little time to eat, drink, or sleep while producing the majority of them. There was an intense moment of progress in my painting where I stayed up all night while furiously painting and saw Barbie off to work the next morning. After about another hour of painting, I grew tired and curled up into a ball on my studio floor and fell asleep with a pile of art books as a pillow! As soon as I awoke a few hours later, I was back to painting again, right where I left off. I had eaten no food, and had only a large plastic Oriole cup of ice tea to hold me over. This was a journey for me, rather than just the painting of a few portraits. I was totally engrossed in my work without distractions or delays. I was painting with an ambition and conviction that I have never experienced before. I felt that I was the conduit to some greater power that was channeling through me, to guide my hands as I painted. There were times when I would take breaks from painting and begin writing on the computer. After about five or so minutes of writing, I would find the urge to paint again slowly returning. The longer I sat without painting, the stronger the urge to paint again would become. There was also little questioning or second-guessing what I was doing. I just painted and let what happened in the paint, stay. I had finally come around.
This was it! I was finally painting without any limitations, burdens, or restrictions. I had written about Degas' total disregard for the materials as he created. That he would take up to a dozen pieces of paper an tack them together to get the results that he wanted. The paper was only a vehicle to what his ultimate intentions were. I felt this same power surging through me as I painted these portraits. I had visited the art store earlier in the semester and purchased a huge amount of stretched canvas on 18" X 24" stretcher bars. These canvases sat in a corner of my studio, in their plastic skins, mocking and jeering at me. Tempting and taunting me to paint on them, but I would not give in. They looked so neatly stacked there undisturbed in the corner. In my frenzy of creation, I dug through my closet to find five easels. Four were floor easels made of everything from aluminum to plastic, to wood, while another was a rickety old table easel. I set them up in a circular pattern along the walls of my studio with the table easel staring blankly at me from my drawing table. I took each one of those pretty white canvases, unwrapped them one by one, and laid each on an easel. Taking those large obnoxious family photos that I mentioned earlier, I taped one to each of the easels or at least nearby so I could get a good look at it.
What happened next was nothing but a blur. After I finished with the first set of five portraits, I had to sit and go back over what I had just accomplished. I couldn't remember exactly what I had produced as I was producing it. It was only afterwards that I started to realize how much of a whirlwind of creativity that I was in. There were art book strewn about the floor in heaps. Three palettes with globs of used oil paint on them in various areas of the room. Each easel had wandered a little and wasn't quite in the original spot that I had place it. I don't remember moving them as I painted.
Overall, this was a unique and disturbing study for me. It was unique in that I didn't follow the initial path that I thought I was going to take at the beginning of the semester. It was disturbing because the outcome came without my control. This was not a predetermined journey for me as it was for my past five semesters. I'm one of those people that like to have a lot of input over my fate and future. This study went totally against everything that I had previously thought that I should be doing with art or what art was to me. I followed a path that I thought was right for me and over the course of this study was enlightened to find that I really don't have to think to paint.
The destruction of my work mid-way through the semester, I think, was part of the process that, at the time, I thought was a loss. I see now that it was a cleansing process for me to shed my "old self" and move on. In an odd way, this study is a metaphor to my life and my relationship to family. It seems that I started out with somewhat of an idea of where I was going with this study and as the study grew, I was moving further away from what I thought was where I was supposed to be. In addition to these, it was an important study because it gave me everything that I've studied up to this point, a feeling of closure. I feel that I have finally moved on.
The outcome of this study was one of the most rewarding experiences that I've had at the ADP. After my study of Impressionism and color theory during my second semester, I thought that there would not be another study that could possibly compare, but this study obviously proves this to be untrue. This study was a great learning and growing experience for me that was difficult, challenging, and yet rewarding in the end. I will take what I've gained from this study and my previous studies and continue to produce art with hopes of becoming an art teacher at a university.