That Time I Got Reincarnated as an Art Student

It’s election night.  Every election for the last 20 years I spent overseas, where you have a nice sense of detachment, and the added benefit of living 13-ish hours in the future from the chaos.  By the time the polls close, usually I’m just beginning my Wednesday morning.  This year, the counting is hardly begun, but I’m supposed to go to bed and hope I wake up in a world where American democracy still functions.  Although I haven’t been what you might call an active participant in the democratic process before, I have been paying attention, so I’m pretty damn nervous tonight.  And since it has been a hellalong time since my last blog, I figured distracting myself by working on a post might not be a bad idea.  So here we are.

It's hard to believe three months have gone by since I moved to Minneapolis.  The reason it’s been a hellalong time since I blogged is because I simply haven't had time.  You see, I am now the protagonist of an isekai* anime.  I have transmigrated into a new person.  That's right.  This is that time I got reincarnated as an art student.

This is notably different from the first time I "went to college."  When I was an undergrad, I went to a public, state university, which just happened to have a school of art within in.  So technically I was an art student, but I was also an education major, and the vast majority of my learning wasn't focused on the visual arts.  These undergrad bitches here have no fucking idea!  When I was taking geology and logic courses, they’re just taking more art.  But that’s okay, because now as an MFA student, I also get to eat, sleep, and breathe art.  I’m just doing it following up a whole other career.

From Deep Time, Amanda Hamilton's show at Bethel University 

It seems like in my first incarnation on campus, financial aid used to consider grad students taking 9 hours to be full-time.  Well, I’ve got 14 this semester, as long as you don’t count the course I’m auditing, which seems kind of insane, but I’m having fun, so at least I can say I’m not suffering from insanity.  Yet.  

To be fair, though, most of those hours are my mentorship.  The foundation of MCAD’s program is developing your studio practice under the supervision of a mentor.  We each individually reviewed the list, contacted and interviewed artists who we believed could benefit our work, and chose the one we wanted to work with.  Mine is the amazing Amanda Hamilton.  Each week we meet and review what I’ve been working on and my goals for the semester.  Last week we shook things up and went to the Walker and spent some time with their permanent collection, which is currently curated on the theme of place…I wish I could take credit for knowing that and planning to go for that reason, since it’s a major theme for my work, but I just figured we could visit their artist book collection (which we did, and it was fantastic).

I spend a lot of time in my studio.  Before I started my MFA, I didn't really think I needed a studio.  Since I never ate at the dinner table, it became my de facto studio space, and back then, that was good enough.  But now I have these three walls to tape up my works-in-progress, as well as some of my favorite past work.  I have two big tables to spread out scraps of paper and a low shelf with short divisions to hold my paper.  I have windows to store my books, and to grow plants for (hopefully) making dye at a future date.  It feels comfortable, and I like the fact that when all I'm going to do in a day is work on my art, I still have a place to go.  I have a reason to get out of my apartment.**

Garlands, by Stephanie Hunder

When I'm not in my studio, I'm usually in the printshop.  Sweet fuck, it feels good to be a printmaker again!  My work over the last seven years used collage with gouache paint, so it may come as a shock, but I always used to identify as a printmaker.  When I was planning what I'd be doing over the course of my program, I planned to get reacquainted with printmaking, with the intention of moving on to other things in future semesters.  Now I just...kind of what to keep printing.  I mean, I've been doing mixed media with my prints, and I still want to make installations, I just...want to do those things through my prints.  I think a big part of that is the faculty here.  The professor I TA for is fantastic, the professor whose class I’m auditing inspires me a lot with what she does (her work is directly above this paragraph, from her show this fall), and there are even more faculty I haven’t had the chance to work with much yet (fingers crossed for the spring semester!)  Oh, and the shop is probably 3 times as big as what we had at UMKC (and the shop there was already the best facilities in the program).

Ponca, Ponca Camp, by Henry Payer, at the newly reopened Joslyn Art Museum

Almost all the reading I do comes back to either art or aesthetic theory.  Okay, not all the reading I do, because cheetahs don't change our spots, and since Princess began reading the Dresden Files last fall I've been itching to catch up with her.  BUT THE READING I DO FOR SCHOOL IS ART RELATED.  How to critique well.  How different artists are influenced by their context.  Major theoretical underpinnings of artistic practice...and going back to look at a collection I’m familiar with like the Joslyn, with new knowledge, is pretty eye-opening.  I even have a little time to do my own research.  The library itself just amazes me every time I walk in there.  Want a book of anatomical illustrations from different periods of history to inspire your body-related artwork?  They've got it.  Want to check out some artist's books?  They've got those, too.  They even have quirky librarians that are super excited to talk about whatever you are looking for, whether it's historical costumes or paper making.

AND OH!  That reminded me of the print library.  You see, once upon a time, MCAD was part of the Minneapolis Institute of Art.  Even though they are now separate institutions, they are attached at the hip, and MiA has a freaking fantastic print library that we are able to visit.  I've only been there once, for a class field trip, but it left a pretty big impression, and that's just one small part of the museum.  The rest of it is just as good.  Since I got here, I've seen an exhibition on collage, learned some new mokuhanga artists, watched Buddhist nuns paint a sand mandala - SOMETHING I NEVER SAW IN SPITE OF LIVING IN MONGOLIA TEN YEARS AND TRAVELING IN TIBET - and now they have an exhibition of Toulouse-Lautrec prints and paintings.  Also, I voted there a week and a half ago.  Because where better to vote than an art museum, especially when you can do it early???***

In my so-called spare time, I go to art events.  It's a bit like being back in Japan - there are too many events, and not enough time to go to them all.  Also, being a student takes up just as much time as being a teacher.  But I've been able to go to my mentor's artist talk in September, and last month painted while listening to Christopher Harrison talk about his work.  So far, my favorite was Nicola Lopez’ show at Highpoint Printmaking, because she combines printmaking with installation, and it’s given me so many ideas.

So yeah, as The Evil One observed, I am enjoying the hell out of this degree.  Far more than I did any previous one.  If anything, I know it’s going to be over before I’m ready to go back to real life.  But for that matter, who knows if I’ll even go back to real life?  Given that I was kind of burnt out on teaching (the whole premise of my transmigration) and that I feel like I need to be closer to my mom while I still have her, maybe I’ll stick around Minnesota for a while.  Or maybe democracy will fail tonight and I’ll be desperate to escape reality again.  I guess only time will tell.

*A genre where the main character transmigrates into a new, often fantasy, world

**Believe it or not, there was a time when I was the opposite of a homebody.

***Actually, the answer to that is "via mail," but I screwed up my Iowa absentee ballot request, and this is an election that anyone of conscience just can NOT miss.

Art is Magic*

Don't listen to the Brony propaganda.  I'm here to tell you that the true magic is art, not friendship (by extension, if Deidara is right, and art is an explosion, then true magic is an explosion, which means my childhood inspiration that fireworks looked like magic was right.  Birdwalk complete).  I'd guess there are a lot of people in the world who don't get a kick out of making cool shit, but I was never their teacher.  Last fall I found myself feeling nostalgic for my art school days - some of my favorite times in college consisted of staying up way past midnight, drinking tons of Hy-Vee cherry cola and working on projects.  Printmaking students were granted 24/7 access to the studio, and there was more than one time when after dark - heedless of the numerous drug dealers and rapists who were undoubtedly lurking (joking!!!  Everyone knows that sort of thing happened on the other side of campus) - I walked down the hill from the Tropicana, across Brookside, between the Twin Oaks, and back up past the conservatory and student union to the art building, where I'd call a campus police officer to let me in.  (In actual fact, I think I did this once under a tornado watch.  Art makes me want to do crazy things....)

My favorite painting from Taka-san's

So I spent a goodly portion of my last year in Mongolia reliving the glory days.  This started after being exposed to all that art and otaku culture in Kyoto...I got back to UB with ideas and a need to do something.  All the professional development I did that year probably also had a hand in it.  I had actually been thinking about doing more of my own sketchbook work after Amsterdam - in my IB training, we learned about the comparative analysis DP art students do, and I was very flattered when our teacher asked if he could use my gallery work from the Stedelijk for a guide he was writing about DP art, but I wanted to actually try it myself with something I was passionate about.  And that's why I started sketching and writing notes about ukiyo-e prints, Impressionism, Art Nouveau, and anime and manga.  Call me crazy, but it's FUN.  I learn something new, and it sends me off looking up something else.

I actually started with the paintings I saw at Taka-san's, which made me wonder about other artists creating "fine art" using the anime style.  This led me to Takashi Murakami's Superflat works, and his establishment of Kaikai Kiki.  As I looked up some of the artists in this collective, I found Aya Takano's Keisai Eisen with Oiso Station 9th on Her Back, which directly referenced the ukiyo-e prints I fell in love with back in my wild college days.  From there, I started comparing ukiyo-e with modern anime - the use of line!  The color!!  The compositions!!!  At the same time, I was finishing up a plushie.  Ironically, it was the only non-anime one I made, which I kind of hated, but while I was working on it, I had to make it a tie, and I ended up painting a plain scrap of silk to do so, which made me remember how much I liked painting silk.  At some level I knew this, or I wouldn't have had all the materials I needed for it, but actually getting my lazy ass in gear and doing it forced me to notice the way you can use line and color in silk painting.  After a lot of sketches and a little frustration because male characters are way harder to make artistic, not least of all because they tend to be less colorful), I finally made a painting...but I still haven't taken a picture of it - maybe I'll add it to this post once I get back to Yomaha.

Finally, I planned to share my resume.  I got this idea last December that I should make an illustrated resume, in manga style since I was hoping to get a job in Japan.  When I was living in Shanghai, with dreams of becoming an illustrator, I did the late night art party pretty regularly, listening to the deed-o deed-o of people coming and going from the Seven-Eleven across the street, which blew in on my cross-breeze. Sitting in my parent's dining room over the holidays last year wasn't really the same thing, but then again, having my Dad in the next room watching tv in his recliner and my mom bustling in and out as she worked on whatever - to some extent, it had that same way of demonstrating that I wasn't the last person alive.  It was comfortable, working on my resume in those circumstances. 

I ended up being ridiculously proud of the damn thing, but it still took me til June to get the job I'd been praying for.  The layover in Narita a year ago was a twisting knife in my gut - I read the newest chapter of Shingeki No Kyojin, smelled curry, was overwhelmed by enlargements of some of my favorite Hokusai prints, and teased by a duty-free shop called Akihabara...so close, and yet so far away!  I actually didn't get to do much more art the rest of the year, because I was so busy wrapping things up in Mongolia, but that just meant that when I started working on the first class for my master's degree, a painting course that I just finished, I was full of ideas and raring to go. 

*So...this was sort of a flashback post.  I wrote most of it last year in Mongolia, but never finished it.  I figured it was a good lead in to writing about the work I did this semester, so went ahead and published it - albeit with a few tense-changes and slight tweaks.