What Happens? (RL)

The two things that I chose to put next to each other are two different landscape paintings that I’ve made. I keep these paintings in my dorm room instead of in my studio because they fit on my bookshelves, due to their small size, and add color to my otherwise institutional white room. “What happens” when I put them beside each other is that I think about my life in art (as it were) and why I continue to paint and make art.

I made the painting on the right during an approximately 3 year-long hiatus from anything related to making visual art. During that time I avoided the art department that was my reason for coming to Columbia in the first place and figured that I would set my sights on going to medical school for lack of better ideas. A friend of mine invited me to paint with him in Riverside Park and I accepted the offer, I suppose because I still missed the activity of painting that had been so important to me before. The painting was made in one sitting in winter or early spring and the cold colors convey the deadened landscape and the cold river. The forms in the painting are graceless and naive: it was the first painting I’d made in two years, and I wouldn’t make another for at least a year after. Nevertheless, finishing the painting and appreciating it afterwards gave me profound satisfaction and I still like it enough to keep it around. During that hiatus it kept hope alive that I still might return to making art.

I painted the image on the left in my great-aunt’s garden in northern Germany. I’d been accepted to study painting at an art school in Berlin and went to visit her before the semester started. I’d made 2 landscape paintings before this one since I’d arrived in Germany, and so the painting is technically stronger than the one on the right: the colors are stronger, the shapes more lively, and the sensation fresher. Being in art school for the following semester, I would made many canvasses following this one exploring landscape as well as abstraction, a practice that has continued to the present, about a year later.

Even though the paintings and their subjects are pedestrian, probably interesting only to me and my mom, their juxtapositon and the stories behind them remind me of where I’ve been, what I’ve done, and how I got to where I am. It makes me think about the persistence of my desire to make images (of any kind,) in accordance with the themes of this class. Though the paintings are technically different and made under different circumstances, I think they both reflect that desi