Leading up to writing this first ‘official’ monthly blog post for my second year in the MFA Creative Practice program I thought, oh, this will be short. Afterall, I have taken it upon myself to slow down and be a bit more focused this year. Not that I wasn’t focused last year, but my intention this year is to focus my studio practice on moving towards the creation of a more limited number of final works. But to get there I still need to explore and studies are for me a part of this, as is a lot of documentation.
As I began re-developing my website and posting to the different sections I did come to the realization that this monthly update really is more than a month, in fact it is really six months since the last update, which encompasses a quarter of the total time in this program. So if it seems like alot, it is. But next month will be less, maybe.
I want to restate now what I have said many times last year, in my presentations and writing: this website is the primary ‘self portrait’ not only of last year’s project, but in many ways it will continue to be so for this year’s project. Therefore the more effort spent in examining what is posted here, contemplating the structure of the website, the more things will begin to make sense. Throughout this blog post there will be links to other pages within this [and other] websites. The links will take you to the work I have done recently, so click on them.
Post-Berlin one of the first things I did was place the full documentation of the previous year in an ‘archive’ on this site; the slides of my presentation in Berlin have been added as well as the audio of the Q & A portion of the presentation. The archive is live, and it is accessible through the top menu on the pages, but not on the cover pages.
I then created a cover page for ‘year two’, which is now the home page of this site. The blog, project proposal, writings, galleries, and critique group pages are directly accessible from this page. Throughout the year the site, particularly the links on the cover pages might undergo slight changes due to space availability, but I will always post those changes in this blog.
For this month’s post the two sections of this website to which most attention is to be directed are Year Two Writings and Year Two Galleries.
Year Two Writings contains three subheadings, Essays, Words of Others and a link to the Blog. Essays consists of writings I have done as part of my studio practice, Words of Others contains writings by others which have provoked something which made me want to post them here. Both subheadings currently have two postings each. Eventually a subheading will be added which will contain the writing elements which are required for my thesis.
Year Two Galleries contains three subheadings, Sketchbook, Painting Studies Process and Photographic Painting Studies Process. Here is where you will find the images related to the studio work as well as more detailed writing regarding the process. Eventually a subheading will be added for the final self portraits referenced in the project proposal.
That is it for this month’s post. In addition to what I have posted in these pages, I have spent the past six months reading, watching, viewing, thinking and traveling. Sometimes I just lay on the couch in my studio and look at the clouds and blue sky.
