Sunday, January 25, 2009

Released and Emerging

I have graduated with an MFA in Visual Arts and am released from The Art Institute of Boston into the art world as an emerging artist.

This program is one of the best kept secrets for graduate study in Fine Art. I am still in a daze from the whirlwind of the past two years. My work has grown in proportion to the hours I have spent making it. I have discovered who I am as an artist and am ready to find gallery representation. The most affirming part of this experience was that I kept growing as an artist, worked with faculty who really cared about me and sold work as a student.

I created a body of work for a group thesis show, gave an artist talk summarizing my thesis and had to defend it in a thesis defense. My defense was with a traditional painter, abstract painter and conceptual installation artist. I have discovered that I am what I call a "transitional" painter. I walk the line between representation and abstraction in my imagery, so I am not fully a representational painter, or fully an abstract painter, nor do I fit in as a minimalist and work with both digital and traditional media as the idea dictates.

The thesis took me four months to write, I am proud to present it as Eastern Seeds, Western Soil: A Path to Transcendence. In it I have written about the nature of perception, impermanence and the role of emotion leading to the ineffable. I talk about the spiritual in art as my motivation to create art. It is a genuine discussion of my growth as an artist fueled by my concerns as a human being.You can read more by clicking on the thesis title and downloading the pdf file.

This blog will morph into a journal of what is next, as I figure out my artist life after graduate school.It is vital to my artist life that I connect with other painters who are on the same path I am and that I find out who my artist community is. Your comments, suggestions, ideas and feedback are welcome as I grapple with the bigger question: WHAT IS NEXT?


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