Monoprints in my portfolio: what departments should I look at?

[Childofcalamity]

Hi all,

So I've been studying figurative painting for the last two years but have recently been doing a ton of monoprints (an oil painting done on a piece of plexiglass that is then hand printed on a piece of paper), and I have a feeling that my portfolio is mostly going to be monoprints.

Here is a link to just a few recent prints plus one oil painting:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/68719267@N08/6244516012/in/photostream/lightbox/

Link note: Please excuse the very crappy photos of my pieces. I'm in the middle of finding someone to take professional photos of my work. Hopefully these will just give you a "sense" of what they are like.

I would like to continue to do mono prints for my grad work in addition to oil painting; what departmant(s) do you think I should be applying to? I'm assuming it should still be painting, though technically these are prints.

I haven't considered really applying for printmaking programs because I've never studied other forms of printmaking.

Do you'll have any suggestions on departments/ programs I should be applying to?

RIght now I'm looking at:

University of Indiana,

PAFA

Tulane (Free ride in NOLA!)

Also, all comments on my work are welcome, of course.

Thanks!

Childofcalamity

[losemygrip]

Based on the samples you've provided, I'm not sure you're ready for grad school to be quite frank. There's no clear conceptual grounding and, while nice, they're not especially distinctive. What do your current professors say? Do you have additional examples?

[Childofcalamity]

Hi Losemygrip,

Thanks for the feedback. I'll work on getting more images of some other work I've done up online but I have a feeling you will probably say the same thing.

I agree with your comment about there not being a clear conceptual grounding. I guess I wasn't focusing on that. My teachers, all of whom are professional figurative artists in or around NYC, like my work. Of the examples I've provided, they generally see them as being quite strong.

Most of my teachers, however, did not go to grad school, and almost all of them doubt its validity in the first place. I,however, tend not to feel the same way -most of the time at least : )

I'm curious about your comment about not being ready for grad school. Let me give you a brief history of my decision to become an artist and hopefully you can pinpoint some misconceptions I might have about art and grad school.

I attended a very liberal, very progressive undergraduate program. I absolutely loved it. The painting program was very much committed to the avante garde. It was as much a program devoted to contemporary philosophy as it was to physical act of painting.

I didn't, however, take any art classes as an undergraduate ( I had several close friends who were in it though). I studied literature and writing instead.

It wasn't until after I graduated, that I decided that painting was something I wanted to pursue seriously. And just as all things I've decided that I wanted to pursue seriously, I knew that I would have to start with the basics and a looot of hard work.

My line of thought went something like this:

I understand that a lot of important contemporary artists are not working in a representational style, I know that many people dismiss figurative oil painting as being anachronistic, even backwards. But I also know that this is a relatively new concept, existing for only a hundred years or so (you could say it goes as far back to 1839 w Herschel and the invention of photography, but I think photography didn't really start to effect painting until Cezanne with his multi-point perspectives). At any rate, historically speaking, this idea of art existing on a purely conceptual level is a pretty new idea. and that if I looked back a little further, I would see that artists had been studying techniques in representational painting for literally, thousands of years. They had been honing their craft (notice how I say craft and not art) for far far longer. And i thought to myself, hey, this could be a good place to start; I'll try to understand and train myself in this history of knowledge and hopefully it will provide me with a basic foundation that I can then build off of (or destroy) when I begin to form a clearer idea of myself and my art and the surroundings I exist within.

I thought to myself, were would Braque, Picasso, Matisse, de Kooning, even Robert Irwin for pete's sake, be without their academic training? Would we still have the beautiful "Woman I" if de Kooning hadn't studied value, basic shapes, and line quality?

So thats why I've spent the last two years working on my technical skills. I felt that if I could understand the fundamental issues of working on a 2D surface, understand how different shapes and colors effect the human eye, I would have a nice foundation for exploring my own, very personal issues. But if I pretended to be an artist, fully formed, I would only be fooling myself into thinking I understood the medium I had decided to work with.

Please understand me, there are days where I shutter at the thought of painting another still life or nude model. But that doesn't mean I have to question the value in learning what those before me have also learned.

So thats kind of where I'm at. My art is not conceptually grounded (yet). It's simply trying to be visually and technically competent.

I assumed, maybe incorrectly, that I would be able to explore the more personal, larger issues, the issues that hopefully transform one from being simply a painter into an artist, once I got into grad school. I'm beginning to think that assumption was wrong.

Are there any programs out there looking for students with a decent technical foundation who would really like to explore/ push themselves on a conceptual level? And if there isn't, then what's the next step for an artist like myself (and I know there are a lot of artists like me out there)?

Sorry if that turned into a rant there. But I'm very curious to know what you think about all of this.

Thanks in advance,

childofcalamity

[michaelwebster]

Its great that your willing to share this info for us all. Of course I want to add a few points. The pursuit of naturalism in painting is thousands of years old, but because of a multitude of issues, is no longer the major pursuit academically. Trying to apply to MFA programs with naturalistic painting is a little like applying to a science grad program and telling them your work is most similar to Copernicus or Newton. They are still relevant to the development of what we call science today, but contemporary debates have progressed quite a bit. In fact, the idea of the contemporary university developed from modern ideals that also delivered impressionism, cubism, and abstraction; moves away from naturalism. There are plenty of exceptions, NYAA being one of the most obvious, but I am speaking in general.

Most graduate schools want you to be furthering existing discourses that you are already involved in when you apply, not beginning them. I think you could surely fit into and benefit from getting an MFA, but I would take more time to develop your direction before applying. While you might be able to find an MFA program for you now, I would take a few years, because you will get a lot more out of it if you are at a different stage.

In addition, I do think you have some interesting things going on in your work, but you may not be acknowledging or speaking about them yet. There is an interesting nostalgic quality and a physical metaphor to memory in the monoprint process. The fact that these look like family portraits reminds me of recalling memory, the "lower resolution" in the prints comes from the act of "recalling" the past. I have no idea if any of that speaks to you, but sometimes you are doing "conceptual" work without knowing it.

Edited October 18, 2011 by michaelwebster

[losemygrip]

I'm glad you didn't take my comments personally, and took the time to elaborate on your thinking.

It's important that you get over the idea that there is some sort of antipathy towards naturalistic representation in contemporary art. (That seems suggested in your initial statements.) In fact, I think most artists agree with the rest of your discussion, and greatly respect earlier representational art, and feel that it is the foundation for their work. There are certainly successful artists working in representational styles today. You just have not advanced very far in developing your voice. I've seen work very similar to yours in many, many undergraduate classes. They look like the work of someone who has spent two years working on technical skills, as you say you have been. But for grad school, you're going to need to have been working on conceptual issues as well.

Are your current teachers in a university environment? Without MFAs, that seems unlikely. You may want to consider taking some undergraduate courses at some of the schools you're considering. It might help to develop your work and to give you a sense of what the schools are like.

Also, what are your reasons for wanting an MFA? If you're just wanting to continue to develop your work, you can do that in a variety of other ways.

[Childofcalamity]

Hi Michaelwebster and Losemygrip,

Thanks for the feedback. I think there is a lot of value in this discussion (even though its something that can be hard to hear).

I think I'm going to limit where I'm applying to a handful of programs that seem geared towards a representational approach.

Namely:

NYAA

PAFA

U of Indiana

NY Studio School

If I don't get in anywhere or I do and it still doesn't feel "right", then I'll probably move upstate for a year, bury myself in a small studio somewhere and start over. I think I'm beginning to realize that I work best with my back up against a wall, anyway.

Thanks again,