Old In Art School

by Nell Irvin Painter

  Newark Penn Station, 2006, paper collage, approx. 18" × 24"

  Newark Penn Station sits between downtown and the northwest edge of the Ironbound section, which used to be the city’s poorest, the low-lying East Ward neighborhood of industry bounded by the railroad tracks giving it its name. The Ironbound was always a mixed place of working-class people, an entire neighborhood on the wrong side of every track. Nowadays the Ironbound takes its character, at least that part of its character considered tourist-worthy, from Portuguese, Brazilians, and people from Central and South America. The Ironbound’s current fame, such as it is, rests on places to eat too much and to watch soccer games as you drink. Ferry Street’s a great place for spontaneous street parades of honking cars and giddy people when your Latin American country wins a soccer game.

  The Ironbound’s overall complexion tends toward swarthy, its sartorial character unpretentious. One day on my way to Newark Penn Station on Ferry Street, I encountered a young man who complimented me on my hair. (People like my gray hair.) His T-shirt rendered me speechless. Across his chest was, “Fuck you, you fucking fuck.” Three fucks on one piece of clothing. To my mute astonishment, he responded,

  Have a blessed day.

  EVER OBSERVANT OF my unsurpassed (though chronically underappreciated) state, I watched it from the window of my Northeast Corridor train. Yes, New Jersey is splendid, its crummy cities testifying to lost industrial might, its Atlantic beaches, the little houses with long narrow backyards where people garden and, in good weather and weekends, eat and drink under leafy arbors replicating the old country. I would sit in the train on the east side, passing the time and temperature on the Budweiser factory, Elizabeth’s hulking, slot-windowed jail, a gigantic new apartment building under construction by the Rahway station, the accounting companies’ behemoths at Metropark, where even Amtrak stops occasionally, and the Raritan River at New Brunswick.

  The Raritan complicates relations between the Rutgers campuses in Newark and New Brunswick. Rutgers was founded as Queens College in New Brunswick in 1766, before the American Revolution, “on the banks of the old Raritan,” as in the university’s official song. The Raritan River runs through (then) bucolic (now suburban) central Jersey, emptying into Sandy Hook Bay down by Perth Amboy. The University of Newark joined Rutgers in 1946, becoming Rutgers University–Newark, an urban campus near the banks of the Passaic River, the industrial north Jersey Passaic River that empties into Newark Bay beside the Hackensack River coming from Secaucus, the warehouse capital of the world. You could say that these two rivers, the grubby, industrial Passaic River and the picturesque, colonial Raritan River, stand for the contrasts, the tensions, between the haughty flagship campus in New Brunswick and the scrappy urban one in Newark. Hence Newark’s river-identified colonial resentment. I was attached at both ends.

  NEWARK PENN STATION pivoted me between Newark’s light rail and my train to Mason Gross in New Brunswick. But if I wanted to go to New York City to visit The Art World, I’d often take a New Jersey Transit train from the other Newark train station, Broad Street, or, as Newark old-timers call it, Lackawanna Station.

  Walking up to the 27’s bus stop on Mt. Prospect Avenue on a sunny midmorning, I heard a familiar sound from my long ago, my very, very long ago. An alto recorder. Now there was a sound of my nostalgia. When I was in high school in Oakland, my mother and I played recorders with an amateur early music group. I recognized the sound on Mt. Prospect Avenue without being able to make out the melody. As it ended, I was about to thank the musician, to gush about recorders and say how much I enjoyed his music. But his lurch to the right gave me pause. Was he drunk? Was he high? Recorder or no, I couldn’t engage a man so obviously impaired.

  The musician staggered a few more paces along the wrought-iron fence of Bethel Evangelical Church, where a worker was mowing the grass inside the fence. On Mt. Prospect Avenue, the musician was African American, the Bethel Evangelical Church lawn mower Latino. The recorder player faced the mower, looked at him sweetly, and resumed playing in the mower’s honor. This time I recognized the air: the prelude to La Traviata. La Traviata on Mt. Prospect Avenue in Newark, played on a recorder. A drunken musician serenading a man mowing the lawn on the other side of the wrought-iron fence in front of the Bethel Evangelical Church.

  That was the first time I’d heard anyone playing a recorder in Newark. But in the late afternoon of the same day, as a party of us architecturally minded, upright citizens were touring the newly empty, faded yellow-ochre Central Graphic Arts Building4 on McCarter Highway, the son of one of our party pulled out his soprano recorder and started playing while we were on the roof. Two Newark recorders in one day. But only one in my commute.

  I’M STILL GRATEFUL for public transportation to New Brunswick, thankful for a visually interesting state of colorful congestion and junkiness and its characteristic sounds—Revelation, salsa drumming, La Traviata played on an alto recorder, and, leaving every stop, the voice of then Mayor Cory Booker thanking me and all my fellow travelers for riding Newark light rail.

  Faux Chinese Scroll, 2006, oil on canvas in two pieces, each 12" × 48"

  For my final project in painting class I depicted my commute from home to Mason Gross after an art history assignment had taken me to the Metropolitan Museum for a report on southern Song Chinese painting. My final painting project reworked that assignment, adopting the style of an ancient Chinese scroll, reading right to left and painted in the scrolls’ warm, desaturated colors. I depicted myself as a mounted Chinese warrior in a gorgeous red coat, repeated in the style of simultaneous narration that I had just discovered in Islamic art in art history class. Chinese-warrior-me repeated seven times, starting with leaving my house, crossing Branch Brook Park to the light rail station, to Newark Penn Station, my New Jersey Transit Northeast Corridor line (complete with lumpy Chinese mountains), and over to Civic Square Building on Livingston Avenue in New Brunswick. Traveling on public transportation meant I couldn’t carry my piece on the train as it should have been made, twelve inches high and eight feet long. So it’s in two pieces, with what should be the right side above the left.

  My Faux Chinese Scroll commemorated my emblematic experience in art school: my commute and my affection for New Jersey camaraderie. A commute anchovy in what I might call Du Boisian oneness with my fellow anchovy-commuters.

  4

  SO MUCH TO LEARN

  Up the hill from the New Brunswick train station and the Middlesex County courthouse, through the alley beside the George Street Playhouse, careful not to fall into the ditch running to the stage door, around to Livingston Avenue to the Civic Square Building, its personality split between left-brained Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy and right-brained Mason Gross School of the Arts. The building’s two sides hardly ever interacted. Mason Gross outshines the Bloustein School with art smacking you in the face as soon as you enter, no, before you even enter, with Alice Aycock’s The Tuning Fork Oracle dominating the courtyard. Turn right beyond the front doors to the gigantic art gallery’s regular exhibitions announcing the building’s purpose. Visual abundance pours into the halls and all the floors. To walk around CSB is to be overcome by very good art.

  My first-year class in Artmaking met in classrooms on the first floor, with tables where we drew, cut, and pasted. From the front door, you walked halls of real art from real artists with roots in New Jersey, like the sculptor and printmaker Kiki Smith. Professional art on the first and second floors. Student art on the third and fourth. Some of it—color wheels, images from art history—clearly pedagogical. Some student pieces look fit for Chelsea galleries.

  The third and fourth floors house graduate and undergraduate students’ studios and drawing and painting classrooms. Graduate students can close off their spacious studios, so you can only rarely peek inside. But you see work in progress during open studios, when graduate students socialize and invite in undergraduates alongside the public. Junior and senior
painting students occupy a warren of small connecting studios without doors, an exuberant, overflowing tent city of production and consumption.

  Drawing and painting classrooms, large, open white rooms with high ceilings and walls for tacking up assignments, are outfitted differently. For drawing there are traditional art horses, also known as donkey benches, that artists have straddled for centuries or turned on end to draw on while standing. Drawing classrooms also hold eight-inch platforms for the model set-up. During class time, students’ drawings, mostly black charcoal on white paper, cover the walls. Painting classrooms are more crowded, with easels and tabourets for paint and brushes and ceiling-high racks for wet paintings. Superabundant color and the acrid odor of oil paint and solvent distinguish painting studios from drawing studios, permeating the painting studios and hallways. The art-school smell of mineral spirits and oil paint always makes me miss Mason Gross and painting in oils.

  BY THE END of the first week I had met all my Rutgers classes: two lecture courses in art history (plus section meetings) and two studio classes, all much larger than what I had been used to at Princeton. We were about half women, half men, with only one or two others besides me past their early twenties.

  Artmaking class, my early morning playdate, my source of art fundamentals and artist (re)discoveries, met at 8:10. My train would get me to New Brunswick before our classroom doors were unlocked, giving me time to sit on the floor in the hallway with other first-year students. I could get down on the floor, sit comfortably, and get up by myself. Agility, though, wasn’t my generational marker. I showed my age by reading newspapers. The Newark Star-Ledger for New Jersey news, the New York Times for news of the world. Newspapers! How quaint! Even the very concept of printed-on-paper information was meaningful news.

  A second-year graduate student of endearing earnestness, Teacher Carin taught the foundational design concepts of permanent use: color, form, texture, line, and shape. The difference between drawing with charcoal, pencil, or ink. Different papers. What’s “tooth” in paper? What’s “laid” paper, and why that matters.5 How to clean up. You’d be surprised by the details of art cleaning-up, like what can and can’t go down the drain and into the Raritan River. There was more practical information, often learned from fellow students, like the best kind of eraser. Faber-Castell kneaded eraser for charcoal, Pentel hi-polymer eraser for graphite. Answers vary according to individual taste and how you want your erasures to look—sharp-edged or soft. A chamois for blurriness.

  We made color wheels and art according to color. We made symmetrical and asymmetrical art. We made silhouette art. We made inflatables. We researched artists—I reported on Robert Colescott, still my all-time favorite artist, whom no one but Carin had ever heard of. Seriality entered my work permanently. Seriality? Basically, something repeated over and over or working in series. Think more than one version of an image, think printmaking, and think repetition.

  We newbies gave it our all. Surely this treasury of discovery was what art school was meant to be. With productive undergraduates and an engaged teacher, the crits were eye opening. Mason Gross crits showed me how working alongside serious colleagues with an attentive teacher engendered occupational camaraderie, even pride in skills we were acquiring. Useful knowledge. I did not feel sidelined because of my age.

  PAINTING, THOUGH, WAS giving me pause, and I was a painting major. My fellow students knew far less of the world than I—at least of “the world” as I defined it—but they painted better. Jamie, in her mid-twenties, had studied at Middlesex Community College, with its excellent studio art program directed by an experienced figurative painter. She made big paintings (a good thing, right there) of boozy parties in darkened basement rooms that our teacher seemed really to like. Marissa, an androgynous waif fending off self-hatred, painted cartoons like Matt Groening’s Life in Hell and Charles Addams’s The Addams Family, working out identity issues through painting. Briana, an incest survivor, hated her parents and painted her raw bodily anguish. Her big paintings seemed to succeed, in the sense that the teacher seemed to approve of them. I found them painful to look at; I thought, mistakenly, they were more self-confession than fine art. Artists routinely paint their anguish as a time-honored approach to visual art as well as trauma. Art therapy is a teaching field, and some of my fellow students painted in order not to lose their minds.

  My one clearly preprofessional colleague, Keith, a thin, pale fellow, with a weird tattoo, had studied at Sarah Lawrence. Everybody praised Keith’s work, and not just because there was a lot of it—at first. He was applauded for being on track professionally, for talking in class, for knowing his artists, knowing his galleries, and, in the summer, working in upstate New York as an artist’s assistant. There’s no such thing as an upstate artist’s studio in New Jersey, which is all a kind of unsung upstate.

  Keith and I were the only BFA students regularly attending visiting artists’ talks aimed at the graduate students, and we always asked questions. Knowing the contemporary art world much better than I, he was the star of our class, though I earned honorable mention for plucky stick-to-it-ness. With a knowing air of assurance, Keith noted my steady improvement, approval that both patronized and flattered me. Keith had a Yale MFA in mind, and we all thought that a realistic ambition.

  Joseph, who worked at Pearl Paint in Woodbridge (since then bought up by Blick and, sadly, closed down), was depressed and medicated but knew a lot about process, that is, about how art got made, step by step. He had studied for a while, he said, at the Art Institute of Chicago, but he made the same two paintings over and over without ever finishing either one. Teachers and fellow students lectured him for starting only one new painting in his convoluted, overworked way, and that one not even finished. But Joseph knew a lot about the properties of paint.

  One day, as he talked as usual about pigment, Josh, who had come from some tony private high school and who suffered from his own painting blockage, pantomimed strangling Joseph, who was feeling defensive about Teacher Hanneline’s predictable recommendation that he mix his colors instead of using his paint “straight from the tube,” anathema for real painters. This prompted Joseph’s disquisition on how the paints in the tube are already mixtures of other hues, for example: turquoise = Phthalo green + Phthalo blue + titanium white. Keith, as coolly knowing spokesman for the class, recommended that Joseph simplify and clarify his painting, instead of piling multiple ideas onto just one image.

  Joseph was also smarting over Teacher Raphael’s pronouncement that he painted as though he’d only been at it for six months. True, Joseph’s paintings did give that impression, but still, Raphael was cruel to say it so plainly. Teacher Raphael, a performance artist, had a problem with painting in general. Thought, not execution, was what counted for conceptual artists like Teacher Raphael. Process didn’t matter, medium hardly mattered. The message made the work. He honored me with a studio visit, informing me I was wasting my time as a painter, for nobody painted anymore. Painting was dead. New media was the thing, and the truly interesting current action was in performance. This lesson he offered me in my studio with scores of my drawings and paintings covering my walls. Openly I demurred; at the time I dismissed his judgment as the prejudice of a performance artist all bound up with meaning.

  Nonetheless, there was something to Teacher Raphael’s critique of painting in general, and in the case of Jan-Vincent, quiet, intense, and expertly trained in Vietnam. Jan-Vincent possessed amazing skill manifested in expert paintings that sometimes fulfilled the assignment and sometimes not. It didn’t matter; he was oh so very good. One assignment had us painting in primary colors with our nondominant hand and our largest brushes. As usual, I followed the rules, so my painting was as awkward as you would expect. Jan-Vincent made a masterpiece with small brushes, thin lines, and a nuanced palette. A handsome painting, indeed, but unrelated to the assignment. The painting teacher loved it.

  Jan-Vincent just kept making empty, polished painting
s without a clue about concept. Nothing tied his dramatic scenes together, not shared settings or backgrounds, not titles, not even arrangement on the wall. He painted a beautiful woman like a movie star cameo and liked it because it was pretty. I still consider this painting as lesson number one in my continuing art-school education about beauty and why The Art World dismisses it as superficial.

  Poor Jan-Vincent didn’t get much sympathy from us students, secretly envious of his technique, though the teacher didn’t condemn him for disregarding her assignments. His painting was just too perfect for reproach. Later on, still making beautiful paintings uncritically, he applied to the graduate program at the School of Visual Arts and was turned down. He didn’t understand why. By then, we other students had learned not to trust mere skill.

  SKILL WAS FAILING me in my painting class. Somehow my work now looked stupider than what I had made in my Princeton classes and the Studio School. Teacher Irma* hated my first painting, which was, okay, I’ll be honest with you, awful. I didn’t understand why it was worse than those I’d made in the past. Was it something in the air in that class? Was I fulfilling low expectations? If so, fulfill low expectations I did. Yet my first painting was visually emphatic.

  Irma conceded, You’re not afraid of paint.

  This is actually important. Amateur painters are often afraid of paint and make insipid images through their tentative colors and timid application of paint.

  I wasn’t afraid of paint, and I wasn’t afraid of color. If only paint application and color were all there were to it. The forehead was too big, the hand minuscule, as though the body parts belonged to two different people. Altogether the work was very badly drawn. Anyone looking at this terrible portrait of a fellow student might conclude I utterly lacked artistic talent.