Getting started...

In January, I began the journey, starting in the MFA program at Lesley University.  The program commenced with a 10-day residency, filled with critiques, lectures, artist talks and more critiques!   Comments, themes and things to consider discussed about my work included:

• Complimentary comments about my use of color and painting skills, noting an “intensity to the colors”
• Suggestions to choose a dull or banal object for still life, to paint machines, cars, visual landscape – less beautiful things
• Use of various substrate sizes, look at compressed space, use of varied compositions
• Suggestions to identify what it is in my paintings that is essential to me to keep in my work
• Trying something entirely different, “turn it up to 10,” expand the perspective, vary the perspective, different angles
• Tell a story
• Look for the abstraction:  crop tighter, zero in closer, create ambiguity, activate the frame
• Take risks
• “Your painting wants to be looser”

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Suggestions for the ensuing semester of work emphasized experimentation, painting, drawing, and experimenting with varied materials, sizes, approaches and tools.  I was encouraged to look at ambiguous compositions, activating space, painting what has not been painted, looking at interstitial moments, sticking with small paintings, painting larger, closer cropping, avoiding classically defined motifs and focusing on subjects that have not been painted, zooming in to find the abstraction, drawing with charcoal.

These varied suggestions have been floating around in my head since the residency, some days feeling more confusing than helpful, other days feeling like I am moving in a direction; time will tell whether it is the right one!