The New York Academy of Art is pleased to present the next installment in this new series on our blog. Eric Telfort, a 2009 graduate of the New York Academy of Art, blogs with us about “keeping the brushes wet.†Eric will be speaking at the Academy as part of the Career Development Workshops on April 21, 1-2pm. Current Students and Alumni welcome to attend! Follow us as Eric writes about what it’s like to be a working artist.
Continued from the last post:
I imagine myself painting and discovering new paths and hidden alleys to “the piece†– the piece we all are chasing as artist. This piece is the piece that tells the world that you have it and have nothing left to offer. I feel as an artist I will always be chasing the truth on a 2-D plane. Like Juan De Pareja before me my dream is to create a truth that is unequivocal. I wake up at 3am paralyzed in bed thinking of the day ahead of me. I peer to my left and see a painting demo from the academy completed a year ago. I observe the subtle shifts of value, and the blind confidence in the brush work. I turn to my right and I see papers. Lots of paper. Loads of paper. Paper that has nothing to do with shifting tone, or creating the illusion of a lily pad floating on water that one does when painting a highlight on the eye.
I blink and the sun addresses me with a cold hello telling me I have to be at work in an hours’ time. Life beyond the Academy is not the fantastical world one imagined it would be after graduating. I mean, in looking back the Academy reminds me of Bouguereau’s Nymphs and Satyr painting. There were amazingly beautiful women everywhere, and I was floating in a sea of artistic enchantment, and, without the pressure to work for money, and given the opportunity to keep my brushes wet. Wet with paint, not turpenoid as they have been for the last couple of months and counting. Gone are the days of being able to spend a day on an idea or carefully studying a head. Time is money now a days and I have neither. I wake up and proceed to my job as an AmeriCorps supervisor.
To be continued…