Final Critique: End of the First Year

Apologies for slacking on the blog! I've been so busy that I only got around to photographing more stuff last week.

My first year at the New York Studio School came to an end. After a fairly tumultuous semester, I brought together some work for the final critique. I added a few collages and drawings in with the oil paintings, and had one large acrylic painting (which got a unique reaction from the critics). John Dubrow, Kyle Staver, Graham Nixon, and Elisa Jensen were on the critique panel, which gave me a fairly large amount of constructive criticism, to say the least.

It was one of those times where I felt a little too stunned to be nervous, at least for long. The semester has flown by and developed in shocking ways I could not have predicted. Every time I felt that I got a grip on an idea, it's been pulled away from me by forces sort of outside my control. As a result, the conscious threads of where exactly I am moving towards have steadily frayed and unraveled further and further apart. Should I work from life as much? Should I begin to invent? How appropriate is it to use memory? Can I use a bit of both? How much does the subconscious carry through instinctive marks? What does all this mean for my work?

All these questions still bumped around in my head as I hung my work on the wall for final critique. I don't think I quite answered them for myself, but perhaps all that matters is that I asked them seriously at some point in time. Anyhow, the critique ended up with the largest controversy being over my big 8' x 6' acrylic painting, which struck dissonant chords among the panel and caused a panelist to express feelings of extreme dislike toward my painting. I admit I didn't know what to think about my painting either, so any reaction was fine by me. Whether people like my paintings or not is not my biggest concern.

Anyhow, here's the lineup for my final critique. I had to abbreviate a lot of things and I tried to show a smattering of different things I've been working on this semester, which has been mainly oil painting, acrylics, collage, and drawings.

To tell the truth, I see threads of coherence starting to emerge from the distracted nature of this past semester, but perhaps that is just because my hand created all of this, and perhaps that is all which really holds it together...the fact that I made it. There are a few different languages, and a bunch of different things to say that hopefully appear through the photos. I had no way to tell how consistent the colors were with the originals because all these works are in my space in NYC and I am now upstate. The last three are a triptych. Enjoy.