Shared Drive: Advanced Painting, Fall 2020

In the Barbed Wire Cosmos

These 12 artists – advanced painting students at Tyler School of Art and Architecture – spent a semester painting in the domestic locales of their kitchen table, family garage or basement, corridor or childhood bedroom. Their usual scene of art school community and critique were strained by university protocol designed to curb the spread of COVID-19, in a year that felt like a sustained marathon of social distancing. By September, we’d all grown tired of “isolating,” yet were forced to retreat to atomized studio existences. We were continually testing the old assertion that nothing fosters creativity like necessity.

Coming together we discussed: painting as a unity and struggle of opposites; how time is depicted and made relevant in painting, be it a political moment, or the passing of time through the seasons. We defined perceived limitations, named ways to work through these and with defiance, we channeled the uncertainty of 2020 into creative possibility.

 Enclosed here is an exhibition in print: a snapshot of works made by painters in their third or fourth years, approaching thesis shows or still experimenting across a range of media. Each artist proposed their own bespoke layout making evident their process or thinking, extending their painting practice to include preparatory work, essays, poems or visual ephemera. These are the studio nuances which we missed in person and were left to experience via jpg and “Google Drive”. Here we have repurposed the crude tools of corporate office and digital applications in an attempt to communicate with one another and convey the auratic and ineffable qualities of standing in front of a piece of art. This work took perseverance and flexibility on the part of these artists, which will continue to generate and sustain the artists in their future paintings and practices. 

May they look towards 2021 with cautious optimism and criticality, bolstered by the strength of this artist community they are forging. 

-Stuart Lorimer, adjunct faculty