These days, pure abstraction and representational art are often divided into two exclusive schools, and students tend to pick one or the other. In the 80s, when I was at Tri-C and later at Ohio University, my teachers very comfortably bridged the gap between representation and abstraction. But in the late 90s and into the next century, when I was at Kent State and the Academy of Art, the faculty were divided into two groups: very traditional realists and pure abstractionists.
When you go to art school, no matter where you go, you get some academic realism in the first year or two. At a private art school, it will be more rigorous. At a state university, the student gets into theory much more quickly. At Tri-C, I got into abstraction on day one, but I also got immediately into life drawing. Tri-C had a little flavor of both the art schools and the universities in our county. Yet the realist classes at Tri-C, and again at Ohio U, felt more like foundation requirements than solid foundations. Unlike art students a couple generations prior to us, we were deluged with abstract art as soon as we walked in the door. As a result, we spent more time on composition and design, the fundamentals that form the basis of modern abstraction, than we did on realism.
I am grateful for the conceptual training I got early on. I feel like this training in theory and design was essential to making me the artist I am today. These fundamentals that are so obvious in modern art were the secret ingredients for great figurative work in past centuries. The principles of art and design not only give us the tools to evaluate modern art, they help us understand Michelangelo and Rembrandt. But though I am grateful for this, I knew early on that I hadn't completed my training in realism. In fact, in terms of proficiency in life drawing, one teacher told me, "you're almost there Brian." I wasn't there. I knew I didn't have my chops. I felt that there was a gap in my education. So I went to a private art school for my MFA and spent two solid years studying academic realism. Mike always tells his students, if you plan to get both a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in art, do one degree at a private art school and the other degree at a liberal arts university. That's what Mike did. And that's what I've done, now, too.
At the Academy of Art, I discovered a focus on the technical. The fundamentals I hold sacred are absent at this art school—at least in the figurative painting sequence. But I have the design, composition, and theory I learned at Tri-C and Ohio University in the 80s. While the Academy of Art focused on realist conventions, Ohio U and Kent State focused more on the theoretical and conceptual. All this makes me a well-rounded artist with a skill set that might reflect a seasoned abstractionist who'd been reared on realism. I think that gives me quite an advantage. My work is finally at a place where I feel in complete control and totally competent.
Why is it that I can't have received this full skill set at one school? We may have reached a point where there is too much to teach, just like in other disciplines. We want to teach the foundations, but we want to teach all the new developments, too. The artists represented in the Empire State Plaza Collection were the teachers of my teachers, and they taught what they knew. My teachers were taught Modernism, but were not taught as much of the traditional realism that Modernists had learned and then broke away from. With my teachers, the breakaway becomes complete—it's the starting point. This is a significant difference that I'll write about in depth in a later post.
