Applications sent. one more to go, such a mix of imaginings and presentations.
Statement of Purpose
I write the following Statement of Purpose for consideration as an MFA candidate in Art Practice in the Art & Art History Department. I wish to attend Stanford University to solidify my identity and acumen as Painter-Philosopher; Artist. My Painting practice is a quantifiable system of reckoning; gathering, dispersing, presenting and reflecting. Painting is so much akin to time that it takes reflection, temporal distance and absorption to understand what happens in the moment and its coming to past. The triumphs and detritus of my examined life accompany and formulate my means of creation. My ideas are found through physical and mental exploration largely dependent on phenomenological recognition. Awareness I attain through this cyclical system is transformed through my timely craft manipulation and juxtaposition into seeable knowledge. This defines my life through making. Along this continuum the paintings are folded in as part of my landscape becoming a great influence, tightening my process and helping me arrive closer to a way of showing the phenomenon of self. This complexity is largely dependant on interpretation and reaction within time and place.
The Greeks envisioned “time” as the future laying out behind them as they backed into it, so what they saw in the “present” had always been there. In this same way they believed in the Socratic Method, a questioning process bringing forth unrealized knowledge always present within. Their beliefs are found reflected in their art and strivings for perfect depictions of their present. The practice of painting marks historical time, as well as human development within historical context. The visual record shows us who we are. Decisions are revealed through material choice, tool use and subject organization. The questions asked in the title of Gauguin’s “Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?” pinpoints the universal equation of past, present and future. This canvas, my first favorite painting, still hangs in my childhood local museum. Now I see in it a more whole picture, including Noa Noa’s true origin and time study presented convexly; read across the canvas in our western literary tradition from left to right. The form extends toward the heavens as the apex of the triangular structure of the painting. In the offering hands of Gauguin’s front and center icon is presented who we are. “We stand so tall because we stand on the shoulders of great men of history.”-Karl Marx. What I see most in this epic work is painting as color and light, the same as from my early days, begging my mother away from my four brothers’ and their reveling in Egyptian mummies past, so we could traverse the halls of paintings. The construction of the movement of life within the rebellious canvas that will not be dead is what I marvel at.
Currently, I aim to re-present experiential phenomenon, which is Painting itself. Omitting and insensibly relating endless transitions not unlike weaving time until the experience is transformed, brought to space with color and gesture. My studies and contributions within the exceptional contextual locality of Stanford University would ultimately allow me to act as link between our trans-coastal painterly aggregate, an in-between role I am familiar with. After receiving a B.S. as a scholar-athlete in my home city of Boston, I set out again, as I had during my undergrad years as part of my co-operative education, toward “the west”, a land I deemed as mystical as I once imagined life as a Division I College Basketball Player might be. Most experience, as is the case with painting, rarely matches the imagined possibility but surprises are what push us to continue anew. Basketball still serves as a grounding metaphor in my painting practice, as do the lessons from my teammates who were my first family after my nuclear. Wakened to a twisted perception with sudden membership in a predominantly gay, Black, New Yorker tribe, my role became translator; equal part teacher and student interpreting while mastering new navigation skills. My reversed relation to the whole as member of this at once subjugated and elite group depended on whereabouts (space); in or out of school, of uniform.
The transition game is one largely ignored. Most players become offensive or defensive specialists. The subtle but essential middle ground is where I have always strived, the ever painterly in-between. I’ve come to envision all-time as points leading to other points in an endless series of movements or periods with “art” a way of stopping, freezing moments, enabling quantification. Between the offensive and defensive rebound exists a whole world of a game within a game, of quickened transitions. Much in the way a game seems to make dense the passing time, with Painting it is even more mysterious. Decision making is recognition and reaction and time is always a factor even when the clock is not running down. While painting on location the sun’s slipping away reveals the chase toward an inevitable presentation.
As the middle child of a litter of five Irish-American kids I began surviving and relating early on, back and forth between two sets of boys. As Class President mediating the consolidation effort between two High Schools or as voting Student Representative to the Massachusetts Board of Education, I now recognize in these diplomatic communication roles and my role as a utility player on the basketball court; my Painter-self. Like language into action I wield the temporarily malleable and always relative (color) into a working state of reality, to stand until next challenged by time.
My interest in Stanford extends beyond the Art and Art History Department to the newly established Center for the Mind, Brain and Computation at Stanford. I believe the Art Studio concentration ought to share an integral role in this dialog. In the spirit of Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous character Mariner Long Jack bringing closer together the forces, under new conditions and foreign environments, “being Irish, suppli(ng) the small talk till all where at their ease” my role is to communicate, to aid understanding, but not with small talk but with the universal language of painting. Painting, among its many virtues, can offer an essential third point to triangulate a discussion. Understandings of imagination and perception that unlock the division between belief and truth in the knowledge equation that is Art, can offer and gain insights from Brain Studies as they reveal the workings of memory, empathy and transference. This new information can only add to investigations such as the mind/body problem, alive in the Fine Arts. I come at my notions of Mind from a Painter’s point of view, with training in athletics, philosophy and academia, including teaching. This vast discipline called artistry is quantifiable and transliterate. I am interested in strengthening the link between Visual Arts and other concentrations at Stanford.
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