Why I Don't Have a Fine Arts Degree

The war was still on, full force, with bombing and napalm and mayhem in Southeast Asia, and confusion amongst the students at home. Ohio University in Athens is my alma mater and for four years, beginning in 1970, I learned a lot about many lessons at and around that campus that sprawled along the Hocking River in those beautiful Southeast Ohio hills.

The early Seventies was a period of contradictions and "mixed up confusion." The Sixties ended with a man walking on the moon while events like Kent State, illegal bombings in Cambodia and My Lai were in the news. Whether it was public education, the times we lived in or simply the air we breathed, "Question Authority" was part of the attitude with which we learned to approach everything. Skepticism about the motives of our leaders, skepticism about our past, skepticism about our values... We were products of the Sixties.

One notion that took hold in me was the incorrect belief that the past had no relevance for what we were living through in the present.

Kate Ellis opens her essay "Parallel Lives: Are We Closer to the Past Than We Think?" with this statement: "Many people today consider the past to be an irrelevance. To a large proportion of the population history is something confined to theme parks, costume drama, museums and what is known now as the heritage industry." Where did this idea come from that the past has no relevance for us today?

Actually, I don't have time to explore that question. Of real interest to me here is that I bought into it. I accepted it wholeheartedly. And as I signed up for art classes at Siegfried Hall, the only art history that interested me was the one class on Modern Art. I had no use for the other art history classes, I believed. Except to graduate with a fine arts degree you had to have two, not one, art history classes. Despite my 90 credit hours of art classes I was still one point shy of obtaining that arts degree.

This is how I finished college with a General Studies degree, instead of Fine Arts. For what it's worth, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

By the way, week three of the Robert Hughes film series "Shock of the New" about the history of 20th century art will be playing at the Zinema 2 here in Duluth. Today's reel is titled, The Landscape of Pleasure with a discussion afterward led by Jeff Kalstrom, Drawing and Painting professor at UMD. Hopefully, I will see you there.

What is the Lifespan of a Work of Art?

My last semester at Ohio University I immersed myself in a painting project at Siegfried Hall. Throughout the spring I committed myself, among other things, to an immensely large eight- by twelve-foot canvas that was intended to demonstrate a philosophy I had concocted, that a painting or work of art is “alive” only when it continues to evolve or change or be invested with new energy by the artist/creator. My conviction, youthful and idealistic as it now appears in retrospect, was that the ever evolving process of change is an evidence of life. To cease changing was the equivalent of death.

So I painted three to five hours a day for many months. Perhaps it was a form of entertainment for others who used the room for drawing classes. My aims were ambitious because each iteration was so completely different. On occasion I turned the painting sideways so that it stood vertically, twelve foot high. Most often it lay on its side. I wrapped it in garden hoses. I punctured it and wove twine through it. I covered it with newsprint like wallpaper and painted over that. And throughout the process I took pictures along the way.

As graduation neared I planned to set it afire and ride through it on a bicycle. But the graduation ceremonies and eagerness of friends and classmates to move on with their lives made this imaginary spectacle seem like a waste of energy and life T.S. Eliot’s Prufock I disappeared with a whimper and not a bang. The painting itself was left for the janitors to discard.

This past month while cleaning my office I discovered that I still had in my possession many of the Ektachrome slides that I had taken of this evolving work of art. In translating these images to digital form a new insight about my premise or theory emerged. The work of art does not die when it ceases to change. After the last brushstroke, there is always the possibility of resurrection. And there are also the offspring.

Examples of offspring would include the countless works by countless artists inspired by Picasso. A couple years ago the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art displayed a travelling exhibition of works inspired Picasso. On the wall would be the original, and alongside might be pieces by Jasper Johns or some other modern era painter.

There may be only one Mona Lisa but her offspring are many, including Mona Lisas by Warhol, Picasso, Lichtenstein and ever the Simpsons' Matt Groenig. The famed woman with an enigmatic smile continues to inspire and bear children.

But what about the work itself? When it ceases from changing is it dead? No, it never stops changing. Time and the elements leave their fingerprinits. Colors fade, materials deteriorate. The arm of Michaelangelo's David was broken off when hit by a bench thrown from an upper story. (It used to be in a public space, not a museum.)

And then there are the unexpected twists that no one could foresee. For example, in converting my slides to digital I can begin to manipulate the images with Photoshop and other software programs, re-defining them, re-creating entirely new images, altering them to such an extent that they no longer resemble themselves... or simply enhancing them subtly, again impermanently.


At the end of it all I've concluded my college thesis about painting doesn't hold water. But it did hold my attention, and the pictures you see here were birthed in that studio space on the fourth floor of Siegfried Hall.

What "big ideas" about art or life did you have when you were young that have not stood the test of time? Something to think about.

Colors of the Day

Line, shape, form, texture... Creating art involves giving attention to all these facets of what makes visual art what it is. And perhaps most significantly, whether vibrant or subtle, explosive or simple, we are fascinated by color.

Our very first lessons in elementary school art class include learning about the color wheel, how the primary colors red, blue and yellow are combined to make the secondary colors green, purple and orange. In college, these basics are once again revisited, with an introduction to techniques, color harmonies, optical effects that colors create.

My father was a chemist who mixed colors for house paints, analyzing the effects of various tints, pigments and additives in base stocks. In my early art adventures he supplied me with both acrylic base stocks and a range of pigments so I could mix my own paints, and unique colors. It was an advantage not available to every art student in Siegfried Hall.

The beauty of painting (making art) is that it teaches how color is altered in its appearance depending on where it is applied. For example, many paints are semi-transparent and when applied to a white background, they flash more brilliantly than when placed over a dark one. Or, to put it a different way, color is enhanced by light, made both vivid and visible by light.

Renaissance painters were masters in their understanding of how layers of color create various effects. A book of colored plates just won't do justice to the images hung in the world's great galleries. Ain't nothin' like the real thing, baby.

Evidently color is a visual perception, because as I understand it many animals do not see color. And color blindness is not uncommon among humans, though usually it is in a specific color sphere. My dad had a book with 100-plus plates of various images that were designed to identify color blindness in people, since his job required a keen perceptive acuity. He'd brought it home on one occasion and we discovered that Kenny Koons next door was color blind in the realm of reds and greens. He saw both colors as grey. This helped explain why on one occasion when a red mustang went by he said, "There goes Mike Martin," who drove a forest green Mustang. We laughed and thought he was kidding. But he wasn't.

I decided to write about color today because of the richness of our fall colors here in the Northland these past several weeks. I thought it would give me a chance to color your world a little by sharing some images I have taken recently. What a wonderful gift color is. Its visual splendor is an aesthetic delight to the eyes, and one we occasionally take for granted, made possible by light...

Yes, ... Let there be light!