Grad School Year Two…Start Your Engines!!
So tomorrow marks the beginning of the school year here at Clemson. I have a strange mixture of fear and excitement as I look ahead. I’m excited to see where my work is going to go the coming year, but there is always the fear that my work won’t be good enough, or that I won’t show the growth that is expected of me.
Art grad school is a funny thing though. Part of me wonders if some of the choices I’ve made in my work so far have been a way of conforming to the expectations of the faculty in some way or another. It’s not that there’s a specific professor’s ideas to which I’m conforming, but it’s the art world and academia in general. I wonder whether I’m actually just being taught to prefer and appreciate certain types of art, but who decided what is and isn’t good art? I don’t by any means think that it’s universal, that the accepted art being made today defines what true art is. How can I know if I truly like and appreciate modern, post-modern, and contemporary art such as Mondrian, Pollock, or Hirst or if I have just been taught to like and appreciate them? Art can mean so many different things to so many different people around the world. It’s often labeled as something that is free, so why does it sometimes feel like I’m being corralled into such a narrow confinement?
Don’t get me wrong…I have tremendous respect and admiration for my professors, especially Mike. I guess all of these questions are going through my head right now because what I do with my work this semester will most likely determine what my thesis will be. So I have some pretty important decisions to make. Am I going to go forward with the functional side of my work, not denying concept but tying them together? Or am I going to focus on the sculptural side?
I have to keep reminding myself that though it seems like my whole life depends on the decisions I make in the next year, it really doesn’t. I’m here to get a degree, to learn a lot about ceramics, and hopefully to become a better artist prepared to make a living selling my work and teaching. I know I won’t be defined by what happens here during the next few months; there are more important things in my life than what kind of artist I will be.
Anyways, this semester will be nice in that I don’t have a class with much writing, but I think that makes this blog even more important for my growth. I’ll be spending a lot of time in the studio as I’m taking 9 hours of studio credits, and they expect me to be in the studio for 4 hours for every one of those credits. I’m also taking sculpture as an elective, so it will be interesting to actually have directed art assignments again. Hopefully it will help me to think critically and conceptually about my work.
We’ll just have to see…
grad school is a funny thing. It’s kind of like real life, and kind of not. I think you’ll find that the intensity of what you’re doing there will not be replicated ever again, not in the same way–
–tamquam exploratur, as my master Ben Jonson would say: always explore.