Walking as Drawing – Billy Friebele
Obviously what I thought was so interesting about this talk/event was that all of the viewers were invited to be part of the Derive project! This project/partnership, which takes its inspiration from the Situationalists (who were described as a European beat generation), encourages the participants to get out of the mindset of think about “place” just as way from point A to point B. I thought it was interesting that even though the talk described previous Derive and Walking as Drawing projects (such as one held in Miami in which poets were asked to submit poetry based off of their walk/drawing) the main focus of this meeting was to explain the mindset to be in during the St. Mary’s walk.
This walk had parameters in that the walk should last one-hour and start and end at the library, but besides that the walker was free to walk wherever they chose, and everyone was encouraged to walk in new directions and on new paths. All walkers were encouraged to think of their walk as an on-going drawing and to think about what made them choose one path/direction over another.
When I set out on my own walk I chose to walk near all the places I have lived in while at St. Mary’s. So when I looked at my drawing I saw that I had walked/drawn many circles around the dorm buildings and the WC and LQ complexes and I had even walked in a spiral formation on the admission fields. In retrospect I think that I was thinking about the campus in a nostalgic manner as I was walking, hence my drawing’s concentration around living areas – I think this idea really relates to the talk’s ideas about how different places can affect your emotions and the idea of psycho-geographies.
Martin Brief -Artist Talk
What I liked most about Martin Brief’s artist talk was how direct and honest he was with the audience. He did not try to hide his motives or reasoning’s for creating his works – he was upfront with all of us, and because of this I feel like I got a better insight into his practice as an artist. On of my favorite moments like this was when Brief was describing his Newspaper Series – in which he randomly selected an issue of the New York Times and filled in all of the lower case letter o’s on the front page – he said that the real impetus for this series was simply the fact that he had done this type of “doodle” for his whole life. The series expanded from this simple practice of doodling to becoming a strange form of reinterpreting information from all over the world that happens to be on the newspaper cover. His own ideas on the series I found interesting because he stated that after working on this project for several years he realized that all of the newspaper stories were practically the same – I think that realization is a testament to the commitment that Brief has had with this project, and I respect that.
One thing that I had not thought about before Brief’s talk was just how committed to the individual project’s process he was. For example, Brief’s single work Success took him an entire year to complete. In this work he looked up the word “Success” in the dictionary, wrote that definition down, then looked up every definition for every word in the definition of “Success” and wrote them all down, and continued this process until he had the, “Most complete and comprehensive definition of the word success.” In the end of the project Brief had ended up defining 4099 words in relation to the word success – this feat really demonstrated how interested and how much he cared about this piece (and his commitment was absolutely seen in all the other works he discussed) and I really liked how he said that process of a work is critical, and that it is a form of meditation on the subject at hand. Also, as I am currently working on a written, text-based project, I felt that I could relate in some way to Brief’s interest in words/writing and his work in general really gave me a boost in the way I think about my own text-based work.
43rd Annual Student Art Show
In my time at SMCM I have always checked out the student art show and have always been impressed by the work I have seen by my fellow students. However, this year was much more invested in the show as I submitted three pieces and had two of them make it into this years show. The pieces I had in the show were a mixed media piece from my Experimental Media class, titled Equation #2, and the business cards from my second project from this sculpture class, I Can’t Breathe When You Sleep. I was also interested in this years show because of the wide variety of work in the show – specifically the mix of drawings and paintings alongside sculptures (Kat’s and Rachel’s first sculpture pieces were in the show) and different hand-made books. It was also pretty cool to see pieces in the show that I had seen being worked on during class and that I knew more about in terms of content and technique and then seeing them in such a clean gallery setting where lots of new people would be able to look at them and bring their own ideas to them.
I should also say that this student show was particularly memorable for myself because it was during the awards section of the show that I learned that I had won what is now called the Department of Art and Art History Studio Art Award. Being the first art-based award that I have won in my time at college this was a really great moment that really helped me to think seriously about the quality of my artwork and how I would like to continue to pursue art in the future.
Artist Talk – Pam Cardwell
The main thing that has stuck in my mind about Cardwell’s lecture was her idea that she works in a way that is similar to a writer. Specifically she said that starts her work with lots of details, then begins to erase and rework them into the final form that she ends with. This stuck with me because I of course have always heard about how much practice and sketching and reworking famous artists do before they finish the final piece, but it never really seemed to stick to my own art-making practice. I was able to go to the open artist’s house and see all the drawings that Cardwell had made while at SMCM and it was really amazing to see how much reworking she does in her drawings, and I loved her work because the drawings looked so much more detailed and organic when she had constantly erased and made new marks then just by leaving the drawing as she had first made it.
When I was looking at the drawings she had done while walking through SMCM I could really see her ideas of “how one thing could look like another” and “taking in as much as possible, then letting it go” at work. The drawings (which took up an entire wall and stretched onto the floor) seemed so organic that they looked nothing like the surrounding environment, but at the same time, they looked obviously drawn from natural settings – many were originally from scenes were the water met the shore line or of pinecones.
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