SCHOOLLIFE

2013/2014 Graduating in Art, part 1

THE BIG BLIP

or the day I cried at school

or the day that I actually thought 'are you talking to me?' and looked behind me

It was the first semester of year four (2013) at the academy. Leaves were falling from creaky trees, horses shivered in their meadows and the wind was blowing around our house, whispering ‘beware’. Things were the same as every year, and yet, they weren’t. I ignored the whispering wind, the avoiding looks from my dog and the creeping of the black cat in and around the premises.
(The latter because she’s our own feisty ladycat who wasn’t nicknamed Black Lola because she was so fuzzy and warm)

I ignored all this because I had become the ignoring type. I was living in a world called school. Sure I went to some birthdays, but that resulted in drinking wine from a family member whose name, age and children’s names I didn’t remember. And so it happened that black clouds were gathering above my head and I didn’t notice.

I was working on an exam for a course named Visual Art Applied Design This course was meant to be the first of two steps of graduating in the field of Art.
(I think the intension was that the student made a choice for his project between Visual Art and Applied Design – but no one really knew).

I was working hard. Actually, I was working my ass of on something that was going nowhere. I tried to talk to my professor, but we seemed to have a missed connection. He was talking, I was talking, but we never touched base because he was speaking (fluently) Russian and I was, remarkably enough, speaking Chinese. We had some amazingly wondrous talks.

And then the exam arrived. It was time to show my work, explain it in a presentation, and collect my grade and move on to part two of graduating in the ever expending universe of Art. By that time it was hard to see straight because of the thunder, lightning and black cats that were falling ceaselessly from the apocalyptic skies. But still, I carried on.

VISUAL ART APPLIED DESIGN

This was my project.

At the end I will share with you how it ended on that dark dark night in an ill-lighted classroom at the academy.

First I’ll show you my theme in words.

If you don’t care much for theory or if you’re more a picture-guy than scroll down to the photo’s below.
The pictures will show a resume of an extremely large collection of studies and works.

THEORY

STUDY / COLLECTION

Work work work work work – little red riding hood and the big incomprehensible theme

atelier

atelier and drawings

a study called (altering) EGO
(pastel, gouache, pencil, charcoal, wax crayons)

Please do not touch - a study selfportret Red Ridinghood
(ink, wax crayon, pastel, gouche, pencil)

Detail godess study inspired by the Prerafaelisten

(pastel on paper)

Study godess Diana

(charcoal on paper 70 x 175 cm)

Me, in my charcoal attire, working in my atelier with on my left a detail of a study of godess Freya

(charcoal on paper 150 x 150 cm)

EXAM / PRESENTATION

The afternoon I arrived at the academy I found the classroom, were I had to put out for my exam, in a horrible state. Tables and chairs were piled up like at a storage warehouse. Trying to stand in the middle of the disaster area I swore I could hear the guys from facility services laughing from the dark corners of the room.

(You should know that almost all those guys hated students – and I mean in a really scary Roald Dahl kind of way – they were mean)

Luckily some really nice students and my love came to my aid and together we build new walls from tables, chairs and big wooden plates. It looked like a space again, but bad karma had already creeped in…

Body of work.

I did my presentation, told my story while waving my arms and pointing at (so many) things. I stopped and everybody just stared at me. The professors asked me some interesting and some unrelated questions. I looked at their faces and couldn’t tell what was happening inside their minds and if this was their normal frown or not. After a long deliberation, among the four of them, the verdict came like a bullet to the head.

‘We have no idea what you are talking about and what the heck this means, we can’t tolerate this, and we give you a FIVE (inadequate, miss N!).’

This is the part where I actually looked behind me.
But there was only a pile of tables and some dark corners. They were really talking to me. The sky broke and I got finally struck by lightning.

The crying part came later when I realised the huge amount of time lost on this project. I did want to slap somebody for that. But there was no one. My professors tried to give me a good reason for the low low grade. They couldn’t, they all gave me a different reason. And one even blamed the others. We were all part of a really weird story.

There were ten students that dark evening and for all of us it ended badly. We all flunked the exam. Even the professors themselves. This whole predicament goes to proof that Art is hard to judge, to exam, to explain, to comprehend. For me this was the point de capiton were I realized I am done here, I’m at your level,

I AM READY TO GRADUATE

 My love brought me home where he turned the dark into cosy, the cat came in and rolled up in a warm ball and the dog looked at me as if to say ‘it’s done, kid.’ Then he climbed upon the sofa and watched some tv.