Bethany

Bethany. We were always looking for an accord, that's one thing I remember. Bethany Snyder here--you can see immediately that she's a person who feels her way through the world, something I always appreciated (I think I made a place for those kids in particular) but at the same time, it made her vulnerable. She wrote me about this once--a lengthy email about how something I'd said in a critique had hurt her. What she wrote gave me a good sense of all her backs-and-forths--which weren't always the same as my own. But I was glad that she'd tried to articulate it. And in any case, she knew that I was on her side--which was true. It's like a stance relative to the world--you have to protect (make a place for) the things that are valuable.

We're upstairs in Room 491 again. With the worn plywood walls, before 2009. You can get a sense of the north light coming in from the bank of windows over the courtyard--a little harsh because there was so much glass. Our painting set-ups were pretty much ad-hoc--most of the students worked in water-based acrylic, so it was more experiment-as-you-go than any set of classical techniques. Which wouldn't have been my style in any case. Things could get chaotic, as if they were burrowing into their own worlds. At least that's how it feels here. And those worlds reflected their own states of mind...

I'd ask the students to put up their work, each new painting as they made it. Everyone had a stretch of wall space just behind their desk. Painting on cardboard, so there were no formal pretensions in the materials. Those walls could be quite revealing--something I think we all sensed. Something to be taken in more than  defined...


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Note: The photo is probably from my old Motorola flip-phone, always 72 dpi, so everything's a little blurry--which means just as it should be...


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