Post Graduate Blues: pt. 1

I have a feeling this may be one of those posts that might receive a continuation somewhere down the road. Hopefully it is not wishful thinking like BoyzIIMen's TheYuppieYupAlexVanderpoolEra or GnR's Chinese Democracy, but I digress.

This evening I invited several of my colleagues to one of the classes I teach at CCA+D to give an alternative perspective to drawing, or at least an alternative to my handling of drawing. As someone who is not yet one-year removed from graduate school, a colleague is a very plastic term, and can denote a wide range of individuals. In this instance, it referred to my graduate school chums.

All of whom are burned out from graduate school: the subtle nuances of presentation (off the wall or on the ground; should it be framed; paper clips or safety pins), the lunacy in the significance of a color or shape, being specific, the over-thinking of content, and the constant barrage of visiting artists asking the same questions the previous visiting artist asked last week.

After one year it all melts away. The hostility at least. Perhaps not the memory of the hostility, but the hostility definitely melts away... at least until I look at the student loan.

Graduate school is intended to be the most selfish time of an artist's development. It's a club you pay dues to so that you may correspond with other developing artists, contribute and challenge ideas, and invest copious amounts of time debating green, reproduction versus re-production, the legitimacy of projection, the grammar of art, pseudo science and process, the cannonic defense of your studio approach, the legitimacy of nothing, and rhetoric... lots and lots of rhetoric.

One year removed I can safely state that I have learned more in that time than the entire two years I spent hand over fist in graduate school. Granted, this has much to do with the experiences I've had in the past year, the relationships I made while in graduate school, and the relationships I have made through post graduate networking. Therefore, I am also capable enough to admit that had it not been for those two years this year would not have amounted to a hill of beans, partially because the information received would not have easily been absorbed or decoded.

The Post Graduate Blues... you'll get over them.