Or how I picked which art school to attend
By the time I was in high school, I was serious about art.
I took every class offered at school, after school classes with private instructors, and in my last year the senior studies class at Massachusetts College of Art.
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me, circa 1985 |
Boston was about an hour from my home in southern New Hampshire and I managed to convince my parents that it would be a good idea for them to spend 6 Saturdays in a row trekking me and a girlfriend down there.
I don’t remember much about the classes. Other than that I really liked them, and that we tried a bit of everything—painting, drawing, printmaking; using lots of different materials from paints, chalk, inks, charcoal and even sculpture out of found objects.
What I do remember is the steam roller.
We were coming out of class on one Saturday and walked out onto a small side street adjacent to the school. There was a bit of commotion so we stopped to check it out.
A bunch of art students were working on a giant printmaking project. Some were laying out huge sheets of paper on the street, others were busy applying some kind of paint to large, textured surfaces. After a bit, the two were layed on top of one another and the steam roller was fired up and driven over the whole concoction--the coolest printing process I'd ever witnessed.
Now, I’d taken advanced print making in high school, and even fancied myself as a bit cutting edge making fish prints from whole, dead fish I’d procured from the fish market.
But this…THIS WAS SO COOL…this was so PUNK ROCK! I was entranced. The girls in their funky, black, art student clothes were actually driving a steam roller. They were allowed to do this!
If this is how you got to spend a Saturday here at MassArt then this was the school for me.