Old in Art School by Nell Irvin Painter

Author:Nell Irvin Painter [Painter, Nell Irvin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781640090613
Publisher: Counterpoint Press
Published: 2018-06-15T07:00:00+00:00

Long Piece, 2009, ink and paper collage on paper, 71 ½" × 6"

Long Piece lacks subject matter, utterly. It was the most popular piece in my midterm crit.

I GUSHED TO a couple of friends, “I’ve learned more in a week and a half at RISD than in my whole undergraduate education!”

That’s an exaggeration—a gigantic exaggeration. But I did learn a very great deal at RISD in just a few days, so quickly it felt revolutionary. How I learned:

In my first crit with Teacher David, he identified himself by field:

My bailiwick is formal properties of painting, such as color and composition.

He asked me to talk about the composition of Cranach’s Judgment of Paris on my wall, which I really couldn’t do, so he explained about sight lines and movement through the piece, how it’s divided in half and quarters, and the diagonals moving through the painting. He contrasted the movement through the Cranach with the looping squiggles of the Rubens.

Then Teacher David wanted to see some of my work. I showed him the black-and-white gestural drawing from my admissions portfolio.

This drawing points in the direction my work will be moving in, I said with a measure of pride. The 24" × 18" charcoal drawing inspired by a model’s pose contrasted emphatic mark making with passages of smudged gray. It was clearly figurative but not totally mimetic. I thought it possessed a nice feeling of movement and a hint of abstraction.

David looked at it:

It’s a beautiful drawing, and well made. Nice gestural marks, good sense of depth, great line quality. But it’s very twentieth-century. It reminds me of Arshile Gorky.

Arshile Gorky or no, I recognized mid-twentieth-century as not a good thing.

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