Advanced Studio Art

I came back to Advanced Studio Art after a semester at The Oxbow School, where I had been exposed to so much amazing conceptual and visual work and theory that I had expected to come into this class really strongly. The past few years, my focus has been on the technical skill of my work, making things look nice, getting better at color theory, expanding my skills in different mediums. I think that a lot of my "artistic philosophy" ascribed to "art for arts sake" or style over substance. Pushing aside the fact that I was probably just confused and hadn't really found the skills to give my art meaning and value beyond a pretty composition. My fall semester at Oxbow was life changing (or at least youth-changing/reorienting), and I was really taught the value of the link between art and academics, and using artistic platforms to convey a message (and how to make that message come off authentically). My assumption with these new skills and energy for making art that coming back into art classes at Freeport would be easy, but they weren't. The schedules were different, I was working with less studio time and way more outside classes, and it was harder to accomplish ambitious projects.

I started out my semester by deciding to make zines for my concentration. I was hyped up about all of the things that I had to say, and got really excited about making all of these little books. However, as I mentioned above, I was working with less studio time than I had been, and I had way more academics outside of my classes than I usually did at Oxbow. I ended up having to work in chunks, a couple pages at a time to accomplish the zines. This resulted in a couple of failures: I would have to sacrifice size, making the zine tiny; and I would have to sacrifice skill or detail in some way, it's easier to make more in the same amount of time when you sacrifice detail. This was frustrating to deal with, and I eventually needed to choose to just put the zine idea down and focus on something bigger. My choice was to take the conceptual and artistic choices from the zines, which had been using contrasting colors and moody content to represent issues with a balance of melancholic sads and jarring bright happy colors. This made things much easier to get detail into, which was a great adjustment.

For the future, I think it's important for me to focus on balancing ambition and realism. I've finally made the choice to commit to art school after flip flopping between that and normal college for the past two years. This means I need to grow my portfolio and make it submittable and a strong representation of what I can make. I have gained the skills for both technically/aesthetically strong work, as well as conceptually strong work, and its continuing to build on those skills that I really need to focus on. I think it's going to be difficult, because its particularly hard to do this all within my home because of social distancing, but I'm aware that this is really in a lot of ways the last stretch before I do apply to art school, so I need to make it count.