From: Marcie Greer (tea.dye@verizon.net)
Date: 09/03/02-03:01:57 PM Z
Just having the time to devote to art doesn't mean you are going to find
the path easy. I spent about 10 years as an undergrad bouncing around,
finally graduated, worked and painted, then had to just work. Went back
to school in electrical engineering, worked again. Then I quit my
computer job about 4 years ago to really get back into art. It's taken a
lot to hammer it all back into shape and to incorporate all those years
of experience into some kind of reasonable package. After graduating I
started down the academic path, but after life intervened most of what I
thought was valid back then just doesn't cut it any more. I wanted to
push my work over into the new era... the old stuff just seemed to much
like regurgitated art history. My husband and I spent an afternoon at
the Carnegie art museum in Pittsburgh and it was a revelation for me in
many ways. At a certain point, after saying "hi" to all my old buddies
in the pre-1960's galleries, we wandered on over to the past 40 years. I
started looking at the dates and thinking about the generations the
various artists belonged to... my grandparents, my parents, my own, my
son's. Also, the question of what is it that defines the current age?
The generation including Beuys et all with the kind of war-time
nastiness, on into pop and so forth, through the weird sex thing early
in the 70's, then suddenly a change I hadn't noticed, where a certain
order and cleanliness emerges with the artists born after c. 1953. Then
representative artists of my husband's age group start ordering and
sorting. One disappointment was not being able to see any of my son's
peers... we kind of got up to a little neon but that was from the old
guys. So what's going on now? That's really the question I'm struggling
with. I look in ArtNews and Art Forum and see the same old stuff that
was in there when I started college in 1972. Good heavens that was 30
years ago! You know, I kind of feel like the guy on the commercial:
where are all the flying cars? My grandmother was a big influence on me
and she was a fan of weird inventions and science fiction... I am so
excited to be living in an age of such potential, where science and art
can finally meet... much like architecture and engineering produced the
skyscraper. So, the bottom line here is that I am now inside this
struggle and I can't make the same old pictures anymore. It's
exhilarating, but boy it makes you crazy... it's a kind of bizarre
free-falling.
Just a view from another side of the coin.
Marcie
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : 10/01/02-03:47:08 PM Z CST