This is a transcript of what was written in the notes section of my BFA application. It is a photocopy of a handwritten summary of the hadwritten notes taken during the review, and as such, only vaguely resembles what was actually said. I intersperse my own editorial.
There was a comment made about the fact that I was better at landscapes than (say) figurative work. Which, as I pointed out, is because I've only recently gotten to the point of experimenting with putting the figure into my work. I'm not sure what the point of this was … it seemed to simply be an observation.
As far as the video game thing, that came 100% from my committee … not once did I say any of my paintings came from video games. And none of them do. BC said that it reminded him of Myst, and strongly implied that I was trying to imitate such work. He flat out said that game design work “ain't art”.
I do, in fact, enjoy the style of the Myst series (especially Riven), but I'm not attempting to emulate it in any fashion, and it was certainly not in any of the work that was in my portfolio that I can distinguish. (To be blunt, I think it's the only video game title he knows, and that he doesn't mean the style of that series specifically.)
Four of the ten paintings were sort of loosely inspired by pen-and-paper RPGs, and three of those are probably my best work to date. That's as close as I get to emulating video games, which incidentally, I think are closer to what I think of as art than any amount of abstract/modern art.
If you disagree, that's fine, but you aren't any more right than I am, even (some would say especially) if you are an art professor. The primary thing that art is, is “subjective”.
I believe that the actual comments here were BC saying that I should take a lot of painting classes with the more traditional painting faculty (I wonder what they thought I've been doing all along), and flat out saying that he saw “no value” in digital work.
Which, I suppose, is fair, since I see “no value” in making such comments.
This is probably the primary point made that I could get something useful out of, but it was hardly anything that is news to me, and even it was tainted.
It's pretty hard to get much more within than the imagination. Imagination, creativity, and fancy are more or less the core of what I think of as important.
What they were strongly implying was apparently that my work should be more about communicating my emotions or something (there were lots of comments that anything I said about my work was “an intellectual construct” or “intellectualized”). Being emotive with art is fine and all, and I already do it to a certain extent, but it's definitely not what I came here to learn. I'm not especially reluctant to engage in self-disclosure or put myself on display (too much the opposite, in some ways); I'm just not particularly interested in doing it as the primary thrust of my artwork.
Nor do I think that emotional content is the end-all and be-all of what art is about. When it comes down to it, I got the strong sense that they were saying that this is what art is, and anything that doesn't attempt to do that, much less accomplish it, simply isn't worth their time. It may be the whole of what art is, for them. It is simply a subset of what art is, to me. Frankly, I think it's better to judge me on my terms than on theirs.
I believe the actual quote I heard was “I think that you can learn to paint” coupled with a strange analogy to a person with no morals learning to build weapons.
I don't recall ever hearing this said. It might have been a comment made while they conferred amongst themselves before telling me the results (although I was pretty sure I knew long before that). It probably came from BC.
I think this is a summary of RA's stance that I should find something that digital offers that pigment doesn't (thereby completely missing the point of what I'm trying to do), and my complete failure to communicate why I was actually interested in digital painting.
There is a lot that this summary doesn't cover (there's barely a paragraph of summary for a half-hour of commentary), but most of the remaining interesting stuff was more subtext and undercurrent rather than overt statements, so I'd have a hard time filling in the blanks any better than my original post did.
Oh, except for when BC more or less called me a “science geek”. I'm still not sure whether it was meant to be as insulting as it came across (even though I tend to be regard it as a badge of honor), as I can't determine to what extent the general tenor of the review was a contributing factor in how I perceived it.
“'What is art' is one of those eternal questions that divides people, by the nature of its answering, into one of two mutually exclusive groups. The first group, those who are interested in finding out, starts looking for things to include. The second group, those who are convinced that they already know, starts looking for things to exclude.”