Loading the Canon #3 by Helena-Anne Hittel

Hell is in a Studio

Art gets serious once you get into the universities. That’s because this is the major you’ve chosen to pursue, and your school determined to produce artists finer than those at other schools BECAUSE UCF IS MORE ARTISTIC THAN ALL OF YOU SIMPLE PLEBES. Or something like that. This semester, I’d like to call out to all those just beginning to venture into this major with an inspiring (?) story of my own: how I overcame adversity to prove to myself that being an artist isn’t easy, and ensure that future generations don’t take it for granted.

In the spring of 2012, I enrolled in two art classes I needed for my degree- Fundamentals of Drawing I and 2D Composition and Fundamentals (the building blocks of fun!). After freaking out over the price of supplies, I was ready to start. 2D art wasn’t that bad, despite having to mix your own black for the first assignment (an infuriating process that I won’t bore you with). I liked to think that, as an art historian, I could be sensitive to color. After mixing several shades of black that turned out to be very dark blue, I quickly found out how wrong I was.

This was not the problem, though. Throughout the rest of 2D, I learned many things that would be more than useful to my study of art-color saturation, hierarchies, different types of composition, etc. Drawing I was where I struggled, because studying art is vastly different from making your own. Should you walk into that studio, abandon all preconceived notions that you are the next Picasso/Dalí/Leonardo da Vinci to walk the earth (though, by all means, use them for inspiration). In Drawing I, everything you thought you knew was wrong.

Rephrased: everything I thought I knew was wrong, and ART IS NOT EASY.

I took class with two professors (I’ll call them Rosencrantz and Guildenstern). I was in Guildenstern’s class, but the two taught side by side. After I fought with a masonite board (about half my size, vertically), a pad of newsprint (a few inches shorter than that, but nonetheless cumbersome), a toolbox (for everything else) and an easel, I was told to display what had been the homework from the night before. This week, we were to draw a cow skull. Guildenstern gave me some pretty constructive and useful criticism. He taught me things I could do to improve my line quality (“Hold the pencil like this instead”). I was to look at the actual object, not the drawing itself. I tried to improve every assignment. By midterm portfolio, I had a C- in the class, but Guildenstern was seeing improvement.

Rosencrantz, however, was more cryptic. “You need a Christian Bale to your Mark Wahlberg from The Fighter, you know?” he said. Having never seen The Fighter, I thought I should watch it in an effort to understand him better. That wasn’t the last time I’d hear Rosencrantz say this, though, and by the end of the week, I didn’t give a damn who either of them were in what movie.

I was seriously freaking out by the time Midterms were over. My weeks ended with hours in the drawing studio. I wore black so the charcoal wouldn’t show on my clothes. I painted my nails every week out of necessity because I couldn’t get the charcoal out. Hell, the classes spent so much time in the studio we breathed the stuff in. Despite all of this, though, Final portfolio arrived. I hung all of my work on the wall and prayed, because that was all there was to do. I got a C- on the midterm, after all. Guildenstern pushed me to do better, and Rosencrantz pushed me over the edge. All I wanted was for the semester to end. All I needed was a C.

I finished the class with a B+.

Art historians and artists aren’t really all that different, though our chosen areas of study are. I spend more time writing and researching than I will ever spend at an easel, but this doesn’t mean that I don’t respect the blood, sweat and tears that go into the creation of a work of art. I described Drawing I as a soul-sucking hell, but after it was over, it made me appreciate my major that much more. You can’t have Art History without art, and you can’t have art without the process.

The moral then, is this. The next time you see a painting, a photograph, a sculpture, or any other piece of art, revere it for what it is. This art is the blood in the artist’s veins. Respect the artist. Respect the artwork. Have an opinion of it, but respect it for the work it took (yes, even you, Duchamp). Yes, you could’ve created something akin to Jackson Pollock’s works. The fact still remains that you didn’t.

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Helena-Anne Hittel (Episode 35, essay) is an Art History Major at the University of Central Florida and Intern at the UCF Art Gallery.

Loading the Canon #1 by Helena-Anne Hittel

Museum Glass

I don’t like art. I LOVE it. People look at me like I’m crazy when I tell them I go through museums or galleries in hours, maybe even days depending on the exhibit. I read every single label or bit of information presented and try to spend as much time as possible in front of a work before, reluctantly, I am forced to move on (and yes, sometimes, I have to be forced). It was no surprise, then, that when my family planned a trip to St. Petersburg, FL, I could not have been more excited. Why St. Pete, then? Simple. We were to go see the absolutely amazing Chihuly collection at the Morean Arts Center.

The first stop on this trip was almost accidental, but since the Chihuly collection was a short walk away, we dropped into the Museum of Fine Arts for a while.

Did you ever get a feeling, just thinking about the Acropolis in Athens, that if you were to walk there, you could very well have been walking the same steps Aristotle did? The MFA was a bit like that for me. I saw things on the walls in this museum that I had only seen in lectures and textbooks. I stood in front of Monets, a Cezanne, a Rodin, and so many others whose names are the stuff of legend. It was surreal to imagine that the canvas I stood in front of a few Saturdays ago was the same one in front of Paul Gauguin hundreds of years ago. It’s almost like meeting your rock stars. They actually existed. They drew breath and put paint on this canvas. They were HERE. Not in this location, but they were alive and in front of the same canvas.

I read every label and freaked out over every name I remembered from lecture (respectfully, of course. This was, after all, a museum) until it was time to go. We made our way across the street and walked into, finally, The Chihuly collection.

A few years back, I had watched a documentary called Chihuly in the Hotshop, in which my favorite eyepatch-wearing hero could be seen in action. There he was, making his amazing glass! The works were a sight to behold, but documentaries don’t do them justice. This got me wondering where I could see the real thing. Dale Chihuly lives and works in Seattle, WA, and has a gallery in Las Vegas. Apart form the impressive sculpture in the lobby of the Orlando Museum of Art, his works weren’t terribly accessible to me until 2010, when the Morean Arts Center opened a collection of his work to the public.

Fast forward to June 15, 2013. To say that this collection was amazing is a terrible understatement. The scale, the colors and the concepts were made all the better by the proximity. I was so close I could literally breathe on the glass, but I wouldn’t dare. It was the same feeling I got from the MFA. I had only ever seen these things from a distance before, and here the were now, in front of me.

I wasn’t able to hit the Dalí Museum on this trip. I had been in 2009 on a bowl trip with the Marching Knights, but I hadn’t been back since the renovation. My parents, who had planned the trip, had lived for some time in Washington, D.C., where museums were plentiful and admission was free. Not the case in Florida, sadly, but, admission fees or none, I’ll be damned if I didn’t have an amazing experience.

The Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida

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Helena-Anne Hittel (Episode 35, essay) is an Art History Major at the University of Central Florida and Intern at the UCF Art Gallery.