School – Page 2 – Deidre Adams

Finally, a decision

Untitled, 12 x 12 inches, acrylic on panel, ©2009 Deidre Adams.

In my last post, I discussed my angst over having to finally settle on what kind of work I wanted to have in my Thesis/Portfolio show. A few days later, our class went to visit the site to get an idea of what the space looks like. While looking at one large wall, I got a flash of how cool it would be to have some very large textile pieces in the show. As I waited for everyone else to be finished with their mildly excited chattering and general milling around, I had a little daydream which in short order included a very clear vision of making (5) 6×4-foot pieces to be set close together, making a single statement. (Wikipedia asserts that that would be a “pentaptych,” but such an ungainly word shall have no place in my permanent working vocabulary.)

The textures, colors, and methods were all surprisingly well developed in my little reverie, and I started to make my plan a reality the very next day. I cut backs and batting pieces, and I went to the basement to go through all my old stash of random types of fabric, looking for those piles of silk scraps from the designer clothing castoff sales and the old silk blouses and shirts from Goodwill that I had once accumulated for some now long-lost idea. I spent many hours of every day of the following week cutting, tearing, ironing, painting, arranging, and basting to get my first piece, a prototype of sorts, somewhat in shape to continue. But I had only begun to put in some of the first, tentative stitches — some by hand, and some by machine. The reality of whether I would be able to complete 5 of these pieces by mid-April was seriously in doubt at this point.

Over this past weekend, I met with some friends and showed them my prototype as well as a couple of the Resonant State paintings. Granted, it’s very hard for others to get enthusiastic and be able to have a clear picture of your finished piece when they’re looking at something that’s just a bunch of scraps basted onto a backing, but the consensus was unambiguous: go with the paintings. After all, they’re pretty much done, save for some minor tweaking, so why spend the next couple of months in a state of extreme anxiety when there’s no need for that? If I really think about it, one of the biggest reasons I make art is because I find it immensely therapeutic, relaxing, and satisfying. Rushing to get something done for the sake of a deadline is antithetical to my process.

I had to admit I felt a great sense of relief once I began to let go of my new idea, even though it was, and still is, very precious to me. I’m still going to continue with these pieces in the future when the time is right. In a way, this is even better. I have all of the raw materials plus one piece pretty far along, neatly stored away for the future like a squirrel with a big pile of nuts. With this plus all the other ideas I have ready and waiting in the wings, I’ll never be stuck staring at the wall, wondering what I should work on. For me, this is better than money in the bank.

February 17th, 2010|Painting, School|9 Comments

Opportunity Cost

Kitchen, 36 x 36 inches, acrylic & oil on canvas, ©2007 Deidre Adams

Last Friday was the first day of my last semester in the BFA program at Metro. I’m only taking one class:

ART 4701 – Snr Exp Studio: Portfolio Devl
This studio course requires the student to present finished work in a senior thesis show, produce a slide and/or CD portfolio, and write a concise statement about the intention, and methodology of producing the body of work. This effort will result in the production of a body of work as well as an introduction to the profession of the studio artist.

AKA “BFA Thesis & Portfolio,” this is the class where we wrap it all up, tying together everything we’ve learned, and get pushed out of the nest to sink or swim. (Sorry – couldn’t resist the mixed metaphor.) A major effort of the class involves figuring out what our art is about so that we can write our BFA thesis statements.

By now, it seems we are expected to have settled on a particular media and theme that we want to pursue to the exclusion of all others. This idea is reinforced by the art world in general and the gallery system in particular: once you become known for doing a particular thing, major changes to your style and methods are done at your own peril. Society likes to be able to neatly categorize things, and if you want to sell your work, you need to figure out which box you can be put into.

For me, this whole system is fraught with angst. I’m interested in a wide range of themes — place, time, language, politics, social issues, technology — and I love working with different media — textiles, painting, photography, printmaking, and collage. If I had to choose just one from each column and work only in that way for the rest of my life, it would seriously curtail my interest in making art.

A long time ago, during the course of earning my first degree, I remember learning about the concept of “opportunity cost” — probably in Econ 101 or some other finance-oriented class. Opportunity cost is “The cost of an alternative that must be forgone in order to pursue a certain action. Put another way, the benefits you could have received by taking an alternative action” (Investopedia). It applies to investing because by choosing to put your money into one stock, you have an associated opportunity cost, which is giving up the chance to make money by investing in something else. The idea really struck me, I suppose, because it occurs to me frequently when thinking about what kind of art I want to be making. For instance, if I choose to work on paintings on panels, the opportunity cost is the time I could have spent making textile work. (Or time I could have spent working on my web site or pursuing exhibition opportunities … but I guess I shouldn’t muddy the waters too much.) The opportunity cost of writing this blog post is the time I should be using to complete my assignment that’s due in class tomorrow.

Last night the idea hit me again vividly when I was making salads for dinner.

When I cut into this beautifully formed Roma tomato, I had a strong, visceral impulse: I wanted to immediately drop everything I was doing and start working on a series of huge, close-focus paintings of sliced vegetables. But my inner arbiter of common sense quickly intervened and reminded me that that would be utterly ridiculous. There would be a huge opportunity cost associated with that: I’d be giving up all the time I need to work on the things I’m currently doing.

That’s been one of the very enjoyable luxuries of school — freedom to experiment and try lots of different things without having to feel that I was giving up something. The painting at the top of this post is a good example. It was done in my Painting II class in 2007. I don’t remember exactly what the assignment was, but I know it had something to do with interiors and Cubism. I remember that I enjoyed making this painting immensely, and I would love to make several more in a series of them. But would it really make sense to do that when I also have a strong desire to make more textile work, and in fact have started on a new series in that medum? And when I am simultaneously thinking about my Resonant State series, which was to have been the work for my BFA thesis? (I say “was to have been” because now I’m wavering once again about whether I should really try to incorporate textile work into my thesis.)

Thank goodness we’re doing all this contemplation and introspection in class. I’m more confused than ever.

January 28th, 2010|School|8 Comments

Entangled Series

Entangled II, 24 x 24 inches, ©2009 Deidre Adams

Now that school is just about over, I thought I would start posting some of the work that I’ve been doing this semester. Besides the Art Theory & Criticism class, I had two studio classes, Painting V and Printmaking II: Lithography. I’ll start with Painting.

Painting V is the last level of painting that Metro offers, and it is the time when students are expected to be hard at work developing their body of work for the all-important thesis/portfolio show. At this time, we’re expected to be pretty much self-driven, choosing what we want to work on, developing our own proposals, and being given little direction other than feedback on the proposal and the work itself, both in progress and finished. It was a stacked class, meaning that the instructor had another class to deal with simultaneously and so was stretched pretty thin trying to get around to everybody. (Not surprising with budget cuts across the board, but who knows how much worse it will get before it gets better!)

As usual, I struggled to figure out what I wanted to go with for my concept. It’s not that I don’t have any ideas, it’s just the opposite. I have too many, and I feel such affection for each of them, it’s hard to settle on a single one. I went through a couple of false starts before I finally settled on this one idea. It’s something that’s been rolling around in my mind for a long time, but I never could figure out exactly what I wanted to do with it. Part of the problem is that as a highly introverted individual, I’ve always shied away from making work that is too personal, choosing for the most part to concentrate on formal elements and/or safe choices that won’t reveal too much of myself to the world. When my mother died four years ago, someone close to me suggested to me that I should do a piece about it, to allow me to work out my feelings. No, I said, I could never do that. I wasn’t even fully capable of confronting those feelings directly; it was better to keep it all at a safe distance.

Without saying a whole lot more about it, the important thing to convey is that about 4-5 years before she died, my mother began to exhibit signs that something wasn’t quite right in her mind. She was forgetting things, losing things, saying things that made no sense, sometimes displaying irrational fears about things that no one else could see. By the time she died, she didn’t know who I was any longer, but I think from some of the things she said, she might have been confusing me with her older sister.

While I was thinking over ideas for my concept, mulling thoughts about patterns and textures in nature and science, my dad had an accident and went into the hospital. I went down to Albuquerque to see him and deal with anything that needed my assistance. While there, I stayed in my parent’s house, which always makes me think a lot about my mother. I also think about how the things I experienced growing up might have looked from her perspective, how differently those same incidents and conversations would have appeared through her eyes. I think about what she might have been like as a child and a young woman, what kind of hopes and dreams she may have had that never materialized as she continued down the path she ended up choosing.

When I got back home, something I saw, I don’t even know what now, sparked the idea of trying to tie together her experiences with the physical changes that occur in the brain of a person with Alzheimer’s disease. I did a lot of research so I could understand the science of it. Neurons, the nerve cells which transmit brain activity, die when the proteins which are normally broken down and eliminated by the body instead become reformed into hard, insoluble plaques. Microtubules, the brain’s cellular transport system, break down abnormally and the proteins released reform into insoluble twisted fibers called tangles. As these cells die, the brain shrinks. Ventricles, the chambers containing cerebrospinal fluid, become enlarged.

Having seen the outward manifestations of these changes, I visualize the thoughts inside the person’s head becoming trapped: twisted, tangled, and cut off from their normal pathways by these cells and obstructing formations. An idea tries to make its way to a familiar connecting point, but it’s either stopped completely or diverted to a place it’s not supposed to go.

I wanted to use fibers and thread to express my concept, both because I love using them and because these materials seemed like a natural fit to express the concept of entanglement. As more and more thread is added, the surface becomes at once more complex and more unified. The idea is not a literal representation of brain cells, but rather a depiction of how the strangulation of the sending and receiving cells means they can no longer function as they should.

These originally started out as strictly fiber works, but the shapes were very wonky and I couldn’t figure out how I would hang them. I also knew I would need several more pieces in the series, especially since these two were so different. I would need to make more pieces with bridging elements to make everything work together as a single exhibit. So I came up with the idea of making a grid of 24-inch squares, and to that end I ended up stitching these pieces to stretched canvas.

I also started a third piece, but since these are extremely time-consuming, I didn’t get this one to a satisfactory state before the due date. I’m not even sure if I want to keep going with it. For now, it’s a UFO (unfinished object).

December 6th, 2009|Fiber / mixed media, School, Work in progress|5 Comments