I sat on the grainy wood floor of the art studio, dog-earing pages of Van Gogh’s early charcoal sketches of poor, working men. With few lines and simple shape, he was able to convey an entire existence. With sweeping and curved strokes, he created cypress trees in motion, swaying back and forth. In my own work, I wanted to replicate the masters. I relished the slow and concentrated process of drawing and painting, the mixing and layering of color, the shading underneath a cheekbone or on the crease of an eyelid, all to represent exactly what I saw. This past summer I was confronted with a new way of thinking about art. Make a monument to anything. Create an image of a memory you have. At Cowhouse Studios, an intensive summer art program, I was asked to respond to prompts like these. This was exactly what I hadn’t wanted. It didn’t help my shading or brush strokes, it didn’t require intensive focus or precision. These were flimsy, unfinished, temporary exercises…and yet, I ended up with a few memorable images: a tall, thin French kid named Paul standing unassumingly on the base of a stone monument; a man with a mug of coffee for a head, the coffee running into his intestines; an image of a pair of scissors crafted out of tape, water, and holes in the paper. Seeing these works laid out on the floor alongside those of twenty other kids made me question my perspective. …show more content…
Must art have some aesthetically pleasing quality, or can it just be a visual representation of an idea? How much information should be included when artwork is presented, and is that information itself an aspect of the work of art? Is an artwork’s visceral or intellectual effect more