Man oh man, I just had my first painting crit yesterday.
I was sort of expecting to get ripped, My paintings are weird, especially next to everyone else in my studio, who's work is either super illustrative(people trying to get into gaming and concept art) or people trying to be Lucian Freud and Jenny Saville. Not that there's anything wrong with that, those painters are amazing, but that's just not where I am right now.
So after critting a few lovely figurative works, and some great fantastical landscapes, we come to my quirky cities. At first, I was met with silence. Dead silence. My stomach fell. Silence is never good. Ever. But slowly, someone piped up about my neon, vibrant colors. There was also talk about my mark making. My professor posed the question of whether I'm naive or sophisticated.
Some of the ways my classmates described my paintings made me laugh. Vibrant, gutsy, aggressive, childish, nervous, and plenty of attitude. Things that describe me more than my paintings. One thing that was noted is I'm much more process oriented than content oriented. I'm constructing these spaces with nothing more than formal issues in mind, and just trying to have fun with quirky, confusing, and odd spaces. (Which harkens back to a comment my professor made to me that I'm having "too much fun" with these partings. Har Har)
But I have never heard my professor speak to highly of a students work during crit. He said that he loved where I was going, and was excited to see what happens next. I was so scared for this semester, since he's a very critical teacher, and often speaks so deeply and philosophically that I thought I might not understand anything, and butt heads constantly.
There were things that needed help, especially speaking about the content of my work. But all in all, there as nothing negative about my finished painting. the one I had started last week had much more wrong with it, but that's because it was only started a week ago. Things like I was being too self conscious, too controlling with the paint and marks. So I went in and I loosened up, and purposely messed a few things up. The image above about is just a corner of the painting- part of it that's working very well.
