This post is way late, I know that and am ready to accept the consequences for it. But it’s something that’s fairly important, so I feel it deserves a little bit more treatment than I would have been able to give it any time between the actual show and now, now that finals and moving are done. An alternate post might be “In which I discuss my girlfriend as though she’ll never read this, or I am explaining her to people that don’t know her.”
Anyway, four years of Megan’s work as an art student here have recently come to a close, and I can’t say enough how proud of her I am. She’s not happy with her time here, and that’s reasonable, and there are indeed a lot of reasons for it. This school just isn’t the type you really go to intending to take full advantage of its good art program. It’s not. We have a good music program and a great business college and I’ve heard our college of engineering is really fantastic, but visual arts are pretty sorely lacking.
Visual arts, such as painting and drawing, not to be confused with visual communication, a business skill taught in the school of communication, of course.
This is something hat I didn’t really think about until Megan pointed it out to me, and it makes sense. The painting program shrinks each year and the majority of the other students in the program, as she’s mentioned, just aren’t interested in it. And so it was maybe her third year here that she began to really consider leaving, and halfway her fourth year she almost did, in an effort not to waste the time she could be spending doing exactly what she’s doing now, self-instructing, for free, and potentially with better feedback mechanisms.
It’s with that framework that Megan’s work, which typically centers around whimsical images of childhood, and in her third year started to get a little bit darker as a lot of the things in her life became more difficult. Her job was un-fulfilling, and her relationship with her roommate may be described as “strained” from time to time. She tended to do really good work though, and while I might not hang it in my living room, it has a lot of artistic merit and is technically really good.
With that in mind, it was surprising for me to see the process she went through for her senior show at the end of this school year. She started with some of the best works from the previous year or so, and started to expand on what began as a theme of childhood, having gone wrong. She then looked at a photo of her brother had set as a profile picture on a social networking site, which was of him as a child, sitting next to their grandfather. She loved it and immediately started painting it. I dont’ know if it was originally for the show, but after having started on it, her mind was almost immediately changed, as far as what to do for the show was. She was going to do specific memories from her childhood based on photos she had and had found at her mother’s house.
The transformation was fantastic. She set aside the gaggle of old paintings she had been meaning to use, and in total, painted fourteen new works in what works out to be just under three full (but short) months. Frustration set in from time to time, but overall, she was legitimately excited to do these paintings. The reactions from her family and friends who hadn’t seen any of the work she’d done (as she had done a fairly decent job of keeping the paintings off of the Internet) were fantastic as well. Everybody I spoke with at the show was thrilled that she’d done what she’d done, and I didn’t hear a single negative thing about the work she had on display. (Less important tidbits include the fact that Meaghan and I did the lighting for her part of the gallery, and that a good time was had by all at the reception.)
And so was the climax of four years of art education. I’m not going to be the judge of whether or not it was worth it, but I am going to say that while it may not have been as good as going to a dedicated art school straight-away, it was definitely a time of self-discovery for her, and my hope is that everything she’s done here has had a net positive impact on her as an individual. Right now, what I can say is that she knows what she’s doing next, at least for the next fifteen months, and while she won’t be here in his town, as I continue to work on my information systems degree, we’re going to be in as close contact as ever. Just… with computers or phones.