Amy Mirabella
Senior Studio and Seminar
Artist Statement
Due: September 7, 2009 by Midnight
The pursuit of art has been a long winding road for me. While years pass, many pursuits in your life change or take priority. Art has remained a constant beating drum that has been with me all along. Whether taking classes or finding time to seclude myself in a downstairs art room. I realize in a way, art has chosen me instead of the opposite. I have tried many different other pursuits, this one continues to surface with a lingering anticipation.
Over 20 years ago I picked up a paint brush for the first time. For many years I continued to be self taught. I would paint when I had free time and when I saw something interesting that I wanted to capture on paper. I had leftover cloth from re-upholstering my couch and used it to paint on. I took one community education class that got me hooked. I learned about canvases, mixing paint, types of paint and contrasting colors. It was 1995 when I put away my brushes and began concentrating solely on digital imagery. I started a Graphic Arts degree to see how much I could learn. Using the computer as a tool, I attempted to express my political, spiritual, and humanistic concerns prompted by class projects. I found that inspiration ranged from a particular moment in my life to an event taking place on the world stage. Creating balance, connection and interpretation are vital to an understanding. A visual artist’s role is that of a poet, instead of using solely words, they composed with images, combining them in a unique way to create a personal statement.
A couple of years ago I felt the impulse to challenge myself again and really put forth a desire to learn more about art. I started the studio Art program at the University of Rochester. I have taken classes in art history, digital media, video, drawing and painting. My pursuit has brought me back to the desire to paint again or at least realize that painting has been the underlying influence to all other areas of art. When I am trying to use a new medium and am stuck trying to complete a project, I usually resort to showing how the combination of mediums can work together. The approach to Photography is similar to how a painter approaches a canvas. Both are about the realm of seeing and experiencing.
In painting, I work in a traditional method with acrylics and canvas. Since the digital age, I use a digital camera and Photoshop as tools of production along with drawing and under painting to set up a scene or make a photograph print to paint from. I select subjects that I feel have eye catching, colorful and have a balanced spatial relationship. Still life’s can be set up using the digital camera to capture a unique arrangement. Often I will take a working image or a number of images and finalized them in Photoshop, enhancing colors or lighting and then draw the picture on the canvas. Through my experience I have learned that the computer is a great tool for me to use in art making.
While classes have started again I want to take this opportunity to create and exhibit work. I am making a commitment to create at least 50 small paintings before the end of the semester. The exact number of paintings derives from the fact that there are 100 days from the day I started classes until the deadline for classes to end. This means I will produce at least 2 paintings a week plus keep up with my full time job, family, 2 classes and all school requirements.
My focus will begin with doing small landscapes and still life paintings. This will be a big change to my previous pursuit to painting, where I constantly re-se canvases, painting over them with another painting idea. I imaging there are canvases that have had at least 5 paintings on them. I hope this commitment will help me to devote more time, and discover more about the process of painting. With producing two small painting each week and posting them on this blog. I hope to benefit from the discipline of committing to painting on a frequent basis. My plan in deciding to work small is to see if I can take risks that I never would have taken with larger pieces that take much more time. Likewise, it will be easy to abandon a painting that just wasn’t working and move forward with a new one. My overarching goal has been to become better skilled artist and not let this opportunity and experience pass by.
"A visual artist’s role is that of a poet, instead of using solely words, they composed with images, combining them in a unique way to create a personal statement."
ReplyDeleteInteresting read, Amy. Right now I am reading Freud, and this quote of yours reminds me of the way Freud talks about dreams. He says that dreams (or the dream-work) is in a way similar to the work of an artist. The dreamer uses psychic material (often not even being aware of where it comes from), to put together what comes to be the content of the dream. So its interesting to think about the artistic statement as the interpretive work of your own art-as-dream. So if we were to run with this parallel, you might consider to what degree your work is a) constitutive of previously thought out or processed ideas and b) the workings of your subconscious. In the first case, it would seem like in your statement you would be re-iterating the ideas or concepts that you had intended for the work to communicate, and in the latter case, its almost like your role would be to dig up the ideas or concepts that are present in your work that you may have not known were there before. In either case, its fun stuff.
One thing I would say is that I am not so sure that likening the visual artist's role to that of a poets is so accurate. A poet seems to be skipping the material that is INCOMMUNICABLE through language and getting right to the linguistic (albeit indirect), content itself. In the visual artist's case, the divide between the actual artistic work and its linguistic echo would seem to be much more vast.
It’s great to see how important paint and painting have been to you over the last 20 years and how it seems to pull you back in.
ReplyDelete“My plan in deciding to work small is to see if I can take risks that I never would have taken with larger pieces that take much more time. Likewise, it will be easy to abandon a painting that just wasn’t working and move forward with a new one.” I’m not sure if this is as simple as you make it sound. Smaller pieces can easily consume you and the obsessive, deliberate task of creating a certain number of pieces each week may end up being a bit too methodical. The process of painting seems to function at an emotional level for you and layering paintings on top of each other as you had done in the past seems like an important part of your work’s development. Try not to lose sight of why you were brought back to paint after years of digital exploration.