initial application

• Semester you wish to begin your directed study: Spring 2011
• Department in which to do your directed study: Fine Art School
• Goals: I absolutely love both a thick and deliciously painty build-up of materials AND a lonely, wandering sinuous line. I’m gaining a much stronger interest in and appreciation for illustration, but the fascination wanes at the smaller scale. There is an intimacy in working small, holding it in your hand, consuming it all at once, but that is not what I’m ultimately pulled toward. I love the emotional impact of people being rendered in a massive scale, for example Chuck Close or Ron Mueck. I adore the paradox of standing in front of an Abstract Expressionist painting, wondering, am I consuming it or is it consuming me?
  For this class I’ll start with one 36” square painting, and increase the size with each new work. I’ve worked so small in the past semester that I feel 36” will be an adjustment, but it will also leave me begging for inches. It will be a good transition. I will do at least 4 paintings, but likely more. I am going to begin entirely abstractly but allow work I’m doing in the other classes inform the abstract work as I progress. Subject matter is important, but in my experience, my work is better if the subject appears intuitively rather than having the idea in mind and trying to get to it. My left brain keeps the painting from developing a life of its own. I just finished a weeklong workshop with the very intuitive and fantastic clay sculptor, Debra Frittz, called, “Expressive Figurative Sculpture”. She gave me some great advice on how to get started each day, and how to get out of my own way, so I look forward to putting those tips into practice.
  I will be concurrently taking FSH600, Fashion Design 1, where I will be designing (on paper) a fashion collection, therefore working on rendering the figure and textiles (still in need of much practice and pushing to consider myself a master of painting and drawing) and FA624, Advanced Mixed Media, where I think I’ll focus on small, thick layered heads using tons of media, but won’t know for sure until I talk to Sarah. For this DS with Tom, I plan to stick mostly to paint. Last semester I got so caught up in mixing media I hardly painted at all. So I will use paint exclusively until midpoint and reassess if other media could enhance the work.
  I am a pendulum. When I started here I was swinging so high back and forth, the space between the tick and the tock was so vast. That range has been lessening each semester, but there is still a sense of polarity, between figure and abstract, between large and small, thick and thin, purity of paint and hodgepodge of materials. I don’t know that it will ever completely stop, and more likely at some point in my life, something will happen to restart the pendulum all over before the clock stops. But I feel I’ve slowed down enough now to actually see, rather than everything just being a blur.
  The week that concludes February and begins March I’m going to New York to see AbEx at MoMA again, this time with my mother. I haven’t ever looked at art that I’m in love with, with her. She’s a master sculptor. That week (since clearly I won’t be brining my larger than life canvases in the car) I will write an extensive paper on my relationship to the New York School and my mom, since I feel they have been the two strongest impacts on who I am as an artist. I would not be who I am or make the work that I do without both. I think if I spend the time, some really interesting connections and points will surface.
  For the first time I feel like I have the tools to get to the work I want to make, and I’m really excited to see it come out!
  

• Student Comments: Mark Elliot, my infinitely valuable instructor for the sketchbook directed study last semester, suggested that I work with Tom. He knows Tom well, and he knows where I am in my process and where I'm trying to get to, so I trust his recommendation. I’m very curious to talk to Tom in depth about his process. What I find interesting and relevant to where I am right now is that all my pen type marking has been small and focusing on observation. And I’m much more inclined to work abstractly with acrylic. Tom uses the tools of sketchbook mark making to build large-scale abstract images. I like that. I think I have a lot to learn from him about staying connected to abstract work.
  
• Advisor's Website: http://www.thomasdaaron.com/index.php