The Academy Blog

Left to right: Wang Yi, MFA 2010, Mitchell Martinez, Class of 2012, Samuel Evensen, MFA 2008, Cori Beardsley, MFA 2011, Kiley Ames Klein, MFA 2011 Friend, Cao Yi, MFA 2011

NiHao Academy community! I wanted to introduce the CAFA, Shanghai University Residency program that Kiley Ames Klein, Samuel Evensen, Mitchell Martinez, and myself; Cori Beardsley have been on since August 20th.  Wang Yi (alum Shanghai University-2008,NYAA 2010) and Cao Yi (Alumni of CAFA-2009, NYAA-2011) have been our generous, energetic tour guides, translators, and dear friends-welcoming us so warmly into China and explaining the culture, art and history along the way.  

We started out in Shanghai, visiting cultural sights like Old and New City, museums, and important galleries. Staying at the University Hotel at Shanghai University, We met 15 students from Shanghai University and other Universities in China (graduate and undergraduate).  We worked from the model, and on our own projects in the studio with them for 10 days.  We also traveled and worked Plen air for two days to Xi Tang, a beautiful ancient water city.  Back at the studio, Samuel Evenson led a great anatomy class one morning and we exchanged in discussions about our contemporary art worlds, working representationally, and what we strove for as artists.  Wong Yi’s took us to his studio and we were thrilled about his new work.  He also took us to local markets and antique shops- insight about the history of China that gets submerged in the sea of modernization.The generosity and hospitality we received in our introduction to China was overwhelming, our big wide eyes were busy taking in all the new sights, people and culture. 

And off we were on a FAST 5 hour train ride to Beijing.  We are staying in an apartment that Cao Yi found for us that is a half a mile from school, and we have a terrific 1,000 sq. ft studio with a skylight in the Graduate Oil Painting Building.  After we stopped jumping up and down in the studio we quickly got to work.  Art supplies are very cheap and accessible, the spaces are BIG and the art is BIG.  So our ambitions went soaring.  Ren Rui and Janet Fong from the Public Education and Development Program at the Museum of CAFA are arranging a show for us of the work completed on this Residency in the Museum while the Biennial: Super Organism at the Museum is up.  To be continued…

I decided that it would be best to arrive in Italy prepared to start carving immediately. I have been developing a series of simple beeswax heads that hang off the wall. It seemed fitting to make a plaster cast of one of these pieces that I had already become very familiar with, and then attempt to recreate it in stone. I hypothesized that learning the process of transferring the design in three dimensions would simultaneously allow me to see how a different material might shift the content of the work. It also seemed plain to me that the design would not carry perfectly into the new material but would become its own work distinct from the preliminary piece.

Although I much of my recent work has utilized wax, I really don’t see myself as “the wax guy†as much as a materially sensitive artist. I would love to make shows based on the medium of the work. A show in bronze, clay, fabric, glass, resin, stone, wax, wood, etc. I really believe that the material is part of the language of the work, particularly in three dimensions, even though it needs to subject itself to the content and form and not become a novelty or a crutch. This is proved clearly by the Rodin sculptures that are glorious in cast bronze but fail when attempted in marble. The artist’s hand is removed; the work is not the same or even good. The sculpture is somewhere else, maybe it stayed in the 20 minute sketch, but it never swelled into life when it met the firm solidity of stone. This was a situation I wanted to avoid. Doing the work myself, opposed to hiring an artisan to do all of it was a step in the right direction, but did not ensure success.

After arriving in Italy and enjoying a week gorging on Caravaggio, Michelangelo, Bernini and other sweet and savory treats in Rome, I rode the train north and slightly west along the intoxicating coast to Carrara-Avenza where Steve Shaheen, one of my sponsors and the sculptor who would be teaching me about stone, graciously picked me up, despite being 3 hours late (perhaps by Italian standards this was par for the course). From the first moment it was clear that Carrara was the optimal location for carving stone. The mountains, peering down on the towns cradled between their foothills and the turquoise sea, are full of marble. The quarries clamor up the mountainsides with zig-zag access roads and even burrow into the depths of the mountains, excavating the rocks in cool darkness. Along the coast area, cranes and hangar-like buildings appoint the numerous workshops where artists and artisans, devoted to the creamy marble and the forms that may emerge from it, toil in powdery dust.

I was to work in one such bottega for the next two weeks. Studio Corsanini, complete with its patriarch Luigi (freely doling out his acquired wisdom both in stone work and general life, and doubling as head-chef who prepared glorious lunches for all), Zen-master/Sculptor/Age-defier Itto Kuetani, and a colorful selection of hard working house artisans, was a brilliant place to see a wide variety of working methods and ideas in action in the realm of marble carving.

In the weeks after the dizzying and malnourished/sleepless whirlwind that is the ascension towards the ever-exciting TriBeCa Ball, one by one e-mails revealing those students selected for the abundance of scholarships, residencies and fellowships trickle down from the committees and faculty meetings in the sky and all students hope to read their name as they anxiously scan the awaited lists. When the queue of those selected for the bulk of the residencies was released, smart phones blazed and thumbs quickly pulled down the lines of text.

Quietly, in between the longer lists of students going to Giverny, the St. Barth hopefuls and those given a summer studio in New York, there was a single name attached to an unanticipated residency: Carrara Residency: Quentin McCaffrey. “That’s my name.†I thought (feeling like a ballerina picked to play the lead in the handsome but strict instructor’s magnum opus), “What is the Carrara Residency?â€

I scanned back through my memory and pieced together the snippets of information that might clue me in to the experience before me: Carrara. Italy. Marble. Stone. Stone carving in Italy. Liz Lemon’s signature line from the popular NBC show 30 Rock came to the forefront of my mind, “I want to go to there.â€

I had done a small amount of work in stone before and basically remember it being really…well…hard. Maybe that goes without saying with rocks, but after having worked in relatively soft materials for the last 3 years (clay and wax) I was a bit nervous. I really wanted to learn about the processes and the qualities of the material, but I also wanted to come away with a piece of art that I would be proud to show. I learned that I would have about two weeks to work in Carrara, and I earnestly hoped to make the most of the time that I would have around the people who made a living working with this material, fluidly shaping it with yet-to-be-discovered tools.

Quentin McCaffrey, Bushman, 2011, beeswax, paraffin wax, plaster, steel, h: 8.5 x w: 6 x d: 7 in / h: 21.6 x w: 15.2 x d: 17.8 cm