Clara Lieu's Blog, page 23

Ask the Art Professor Live #1: Deadlines, Graduate School, and Categories

You can watch my first live video of “Ask the Art Professor” below. I had a blast and will be broadcasting again next Thursday, April 14 at 9:30pm EST.  Like my Facebook page, and you’ll get notification when the live video begins.

0:00-Introduction

4:36-“When deadlines start to get to you, how do you keep your love for making art alive?”

17:25-“Do you ever miss your years as an art student?”

26:01-“How do we tell the difference between genuine creative art that may not be realistic?”

“Every year only a small portion of students go to graduate schools. Why do you think it happens like that and what do you think are the most important values you can learn from graduate schools? Do you think it’s better to go to graduate school right after Bachelor degree or after working for a few years?”

“Ask the Art Prof” on Facebook Live on Thursday, April 7 at 9:30pm EST

Many of you have probably noticed that my “Ask the Art Prof” advice column for visual artists on the Huffington Post has been on hiatus since last August.   Last September, an enormous project kicked into high gear that has been consuming all of my time since then.

A few weeks back, I actually had some spare time for a change, and I started writing a new column.  I have to admit that I felt bored.  The writing process felt tedious, slow, and limited. This had never happened before when I was writing a column.  Previously, the words always seemed to spill effortlessly on the page, and I really enjoyed the process of gradually organizing and editing my thoughts into a coherent form.  I didn’t want to, but I abandoned the new column after about an hour of frustration.

I started wondering whether my advice column needed a change, perhaps a new format or direction. After all, I’ve been writing “Ask the Art Prof” for 3 years now, and I’ve written over 120 columns at this point. So I think it was synchronicity that I started reading about Facebook Live in the news at the same time that I was re-evaluating the format of my advice column. On top of that, I noticed in my Twitter feed that New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Nicholas Kristof has started doing Facebook Live posts recently on his Facebook page. Just thinking about all the possibilities with this new format got me excited.

I’d like to invite you to join me for “Ask the Art Prof” on Facebook Live on my Facebook page on Thursday, April 7 at 9:30pm EST (Eastern Standard Time) Like my Facebook page and you’ll receive a notification when my live video begins.

This live video will be similar to my advice column, in that you’ll get to ask me anything you want that’s related to being a visual artist: the creative process, art school, career advice, art techniques, teaching art, how to be a working artist today, and much more.

Show up for the live video and ask me questions by commenting on the post while I’m live, and I’ll answer right then and there.

See you then!

Subscribe to my email list! I send announcements only a few times a year.

“Ask the Art Professor” on Facebook Live on Thursday, April 7 at 9:30pm EST

Many of you have probably noticed that my “Ask the Art Professor” advice column for visual artists on the Huffington Post has been on hiatus since last August.   Last September, an enormous project kicked into high gear that has been consuming all of my time since then.

A few weeks back, I actually had some spare time for a change, and I started writing a new column.  I have to admit that I felt bored.  The writing process felt tedious, slow, and limited. This had never happened before when I was writing a column.  Previously, the words always seemed to spill effortlessly on the page, and I really enjoyed the process of gradually organizing and editing my thoughts into a coherent form.  I didn’t want to, but I abandoned the new column after about an hour of frustration.

I started wondering whether my advice column needed a change, perhaps a new format or direction. After all, I’ve been writing “Ask the Art Professor” for 3 years now, and I’ve written over 120 columns at this point. So I think it was synchronicity that I started reading about Facebook Live in the news at the same time that I was re-evaluating the format of my advice column. On top of that, I noticed in my Twitter feed that New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Nicholas Kristof has started doing Facebook Live posts recently on his Facebook page. Just thinking about all the possibilities with this new format got me excited.

New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Nicholas Kristof (left)

I’d like to invite you to join me for “Ask the Art Professor” on Facebook Live on my Facebook page on Thursday, April 7 at 9:30pm EST (Eastern Standard Time) Like my Facebook page and you’ll receive a notification when my live video begins.

This live video will be similar to my advice column, in that you’ll get to ask me anything you want that’s related to being a visual artist: the creative process, art school, career advice, art techniques, teaching art, how to be a working artist today, and much more.

Show up for the live video and ask me questions by commenting on the post while I’m live, and I’ll answer right then and there.

See you then!

Subscribe to my email list! I send announcements only once or twice a year tops.

Beyond the Classroom

I’ve been teaching studio art at the college level for 11 years now, and lately I’ve been noticing that there’s been a shift in terms of my relationship with my students.  In the very beginning of my teaching career, none of my students had graduated yet, so I didn’t have a lot of interaction with students who were alums. Today, the freshman at RISD who I taught in 2007 have now been out of school for five years, which is long enough that my interaction with them after they leave RISD has changed a lot.

After a class ends, my students stay in touch with me to varying degrees: some students I literally never see again, some I run into on campus, others I’ll get a cup of coffee with to catch up, some have an identity crisis at some point and need advice, I’ve provided job references, hired alums to help with some small jobs related to my studio practice, and I’ve even had a few students call me on the phone in tears.

My relationship with my students changes tremendously once they are no longer in my class.  Once a student leaves my class, there’s no longer a grade that is looming over their heads.  When the grading situation no longer exists, I’ve found that it makes for a much more relaxed atmosphere and I can relate to them on a more casual basis.

When a student becomes an alum, my relationship with a former student shifts again. After all, we’re working both in the same professional world now.  I remember when I was still in graduate school that a music professor once told me “eventually you and your former professors will become colleagues.”  At the time, that seemed like such a strange concept, and I couldn’t quite wrap my head around regarding one of my former professors as a peer. I was still in student mode, so I still felt intimidated by my professors, even with ones I really liked.

Me with one of my former RISD professors back in 2012 at a solo exhibition I had.

For many years, I was the former student who made the effort to stay in touch with my former professors after school.  I’ve known several of my former professors for 20 years now.  I see two of them regularly, and I greatly cherish my friendships with them. Now, I’m the former professor, hearing from my former students who reach out to me.

My experience in studio art classes is that art professors and art students go through so much together. (especially at RISD) In every class, I go to hell and back with my class several times, all of us trying to stay in one piece along the way. That experience alone is enough to create a special bond.  However, just because I interact with a student in a positive manner in the classroom, that doesn’t necessarily mean that a friendship will grow afterwards. I’ve had many students who were absolutely phenomenal in my class and accomplished extraordinary work, but who I didn’t connect with beyond the classroom.

To foster a connection after school, you have to be able to relate in a completely different context. (i.e. not in a classroom setting)  When a student truly connects with you as a person and stays in touch with you over many years, it’s really special. With 11 years of teaching behind me now, my friendships with my former students have developed a depth that I could never have anticipated. I’ve had some pretty intense conversations with former students which have been extremely rewarding. For me, this is one of the best parts of being a professor.

Video Critiques for Aspiring and Professional Artists

Due to popular demand, I am now expanding my video critique program to include video critiques for aspiring and professional artists, in addition to video critiques for students preparing a portfolio for college admission.

Many artists of all ages and levels of experience have emailed to me over the past few months asking for me to critique their artwork. The people who have emailed me have said that they have no one who they can ask for feedback on their artwork, so I am pleased to be able to provide a solution for this need.

Each video critique is 30 minutes long and costs $60 USD. Get more information here, and you can watch a sample video critique of a student’s portfolio for college admission below. For aspiring and professional artists, the video critiques will be in the same format as the sample video below, but with different content based on each artist’s individual concerns and goals. (portfolios for college admission have requirements that are specific to the admissions process)

When to Stay, and When to Walk Away

Lately it seems like my patience is being tested in a way it never has been before. Patience doesn’t come naturally to me, and it’s a skill I’m constantly trying to work on.  I always want to keep moving forward, and when the work comes to a standstill,  it can be torturous. I feel like I’m doomed to linger in Purgatory for an undetermined amount of time. I fight a constant dilemma in my head with every single project I work on in terms of when to stay, and when to walk away.

When I’ve worked on a project for a long time, and start to get an itch to move on, I start to obsess over a stream of questions that have no definitive answers.  Am I just being impatient? Am I not giving the work enough time to truly develop and come to full fruition?  Am I cutting off my work flow prematurely? Or would further work on the project just be repetition of what I’ve already done?  Am I wasting my time if I stick around?  What if there’s something amazing that’s just around the corner that I could discover if I stick around for a few more weeks? What if there’s nothing worthwhile in the future, and I’m just beating a dead horse? What point am I at in the project, is this the end?  Or is it really just the beginning? Should I stop thinking so much? Is my thinking paralyzing the project?

I’ve had some projects naturally wrap themselves up in a neat package that feels resolved and complete. At different stages, I can feel confident about where I am in the project.  I know when I’ve got a long way to go, and I can clearly see the finish line slowly emerging as I approach. That was certainly the case with my last body of work, Falling, which I worked on for four years. When I was working on the mezzotint prints, I knew the project would be over when the prints were finished.

     

Other projects can be incredibly rocky, chaotic, with a million unpredictable factors that are up in the air.  I can’t see the finish line at all. I have the choice to keep running, with the frightening thought that the finish line I’m looking for might never materialize.  Or, I can stop while I’m still ahead, with the possibility of either 1) feeling regret later or 2) feeling relieved that I didn’t waste time on a project that was going nowhere.

Sometimes I get so fed up to the point that I force a finish line by stopping and drawing it myself. This time, I’m going to keep running.  I’m going to wait for a finish line to emerge on it’s own time, no matter how long I have to run.

“Ask for What You Want”

Self-initiative is everything when you’re a visual artist. If there’s anything I’ve learned over the past decade of teaching and making art, it’s that opportunities in visual arts almost never fall into your lap.  Unless you are independently wealthy, extremely well connected, or insanely lucky, you have to take the responsibility to go out there and find and/or create opportunities for yourself.

Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2006, is famous for his “Last Lecture” which he gave back in 2008.  In the lecture, he talks about “really achieving your childhood dreams.”  One of my favorite pieces of advice that he gives is to “ask for what you want.” It sounds like a statement that should be obvious, but I was surprised that when I sat down to really think about it at the time, how infrequently I actually asked for what I wanted.

There are two actions to that piece of advice:  1) identifying what you want and then 2) asking for it. Depending on what you want to do, figuring out what it is you want can be totally obvious or completely mysterious. For me, knowing what I want hasn’t been challenging, it’s the asking part that can so difficult to do.

Recently, I’ve had to do a massive amount of asking, way more than usual. Every time I ask for something, whether it’s a grant proposal I’m putting together, an exhibition opportunity, or a job, I feel like I’m walking a plank on a pirate ship.  Most of the time, I start with an email inquiry, and I have to take a deep breath before I click “send.”It’s hard to ask for things. In most situations, you’re asking someone you barely know, or don’t know at all.  Asking can be exhausting, and you have to prepare yourself to be rejected over and over again, with the high likelihood that you won’t get a response. It can get to the point where you become grateful for any response, even if it’s a no. This process can be very frustrating; it can feel demeaning when you’re constantly begging on your hands and knees all the time for even the slightest bit of acknowledgement.

I don’t know why asking is so intimidating for me despite the fact that I have evidence that asking can be effective. I try to remind myself that asking is no skin off my back. After all, the worst case scenario is either being ignored or rejected, which is nothing new.

I try to remember that you only need one person to say “yes” for all of that asking to be worth it. Even though the asking can be painful, I know that it’s possible to get results this way. I’ve landed jobs and exhibitions because I asked, asked the next year, and then the next year, until that polite rejection became a “yes.”

Subscribe to my Email List!

You can now subscribe to my email list to receive announcements here. I only send emails a few times a year, if that, so don’t expect me to flood your inbox on a regular basis.

There might be an announcement in the near future you won’t want to miss!

Patience and Faith

By nature, I’m not a patient person. I’m compulsive about getting things done immediately whenever possible.  I worry that if I don’t do a task as soon as possible, that I’ll end up with an overwhelming amount of things to do and something will ultimately get missed. That’s my inherent character, but I’ve learned throughout the years how important it is to have patience as an artist.

Right now, my RISD Project Open Door students are working on linoleum block prints based on Op-Ed articles from the New York Times. The process is very time consuming, and will take about 6-7 three hour classes to complete.  There’s brainstorming, thumbnail sketches to make, the carving of the linoleum block, and the printing process. The pacing of this project is odd.  In the beginning when you’re sketching and carving the linoleum block, the process is really slow and at times it feels like you’ll never get there. Carving the linoleum blocks is not a process you can rush either.  Not only is rushing through a safety hazard, but everything you carve is permanent, so you have to be very deliberate and confident about where you choose to carve.

When the linoleum carving is finally finished, and you ink up your block and pull the print, it’s a magical moment where your image suddenly appears in an instant.  It’s a startling experience, because you spend so much time sketching and carving, and frequently the printed image looks very different from what you anticipated.

After pulling that first print, students give me puzzled looks when I tell them that they’ve still got a long way to go.  I’m always pushing my students to spend more time with their pieces, and to truly bring their works to a full finish.  I find that many students are fundamentally doing very good work, but many of them stop prematurely. It’s as if you were running a marathon, maintaining a good pace, but then stopped at mile 10 and didn’t bother to cross the finish line.

Ultimately, when you work professionally, bringing something to a full finish can be more critical than the quality of the work itself.  If an art director is on a tight deadline, and they have to choose between an illustrator who who can pass in a finished piece and an illustrator who can’t finish by the deadline, which do you think they’ll have to pick?  I read Sheryl Sandberg’s book “Lean in: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead”, and at one point she describes a poster they have in their office that says “Done is better than perfect.” Ideally, I want my students to achieve both quality and finish, but it’s important to realize when you work professionally how crucial the finish part is. If students never have the experience of completing an artwork all the way while they’re in school, learning that lesson while you’re on the job is an unpleasant surprise.

I’m always talking to my students about developing patience in their work.  I have to push them to find the motivation they need to continue working on a piece they thought was done. Sometimes that extra hour or two on a project can be all the difference in the world. Although I am well aware of how important that extra time on a project can be, it’s still so hard for me to apply this principle to myself.

In my projects, I always have ongoing questions in my head that asks whether a project just needs more time, or whether I’m beating a dead horse and really should just get up and walk away. It can be very trying to tell yourself to stick with something when your impulse is to get up and leave. I think the hardest part is that to have patience, you also have to maintain a strong faith that your project will keep moving forward in a positive way. So maybe faith is more important than patience here, because as long as you have faith, the patience will come.

Less is More

When you teach, it’s one thing to know your material, and another to know how to translate that material into a digestible format that actually sticks.  Over the past few years, I’ve learned that less is always more when it comes to teaching.  The natural reaction for many teachers is to provide as much information as possible.  This is especially true when you’re teaching an introductory course because there’s so much that needs to be covered. When you have a lot of expertise in your field, it’s easy to forget how overwhelming even the most simple concept can be at first glance. I’ve found that students can quickly drown in information, and that it’s much more effective to offer small morsels that are given at incremental stages.

The other day, I was digging through some old syllabi from when I first started teaching, and I was startled by how different they were than the syllabi I use today. I used to explain every possible scenario that could happen in a syllabus, but I’ve discovered that once the syllabus is longer than two pages, students won’t bother reading the syllabus at all. So I have the option of having 1) a short syllabus that students will actually read, or 2) a syllabus that explains everything, but that doesn’t get read.  Take a wild guess which option I use today.  Certainly, there’s a compromise because a shorter syllabus limits your content, but if that’s the difference between being read or not, that’s a compromise I’m willing to make.

Despite my experience with less is more, I’m still struggling with this balance in my current project. Part of me always wants to add more content, but in the feedback I’ve received, I’ve seen that my audience is quickly overwhelmed by large quantities of content. I think for many teachers, adding more content is in some ways a kind of insurance policy.  We worry that if we cut back on content that our students will miss the point, so we pad our content with supplementary information that isn’t critical. I’ve seen concrete evidence with this project that small bites that are succinct and straightforward can have a tremendous impact.  If a small bite piques a student’s curiosity and stimulates a craving for more, that in itself is much more valuable than having every fact crammed down your throat.  If you bombard students with too much content all at once, not only will they not retain that content, but they won’t come back for more. I think about those first bites as appetizers in a meal.  A good appetizer stimulates your senses, doesn’t fill you up and spoil your appetite for the entrees, and makes you hunger for more.  Once you get your students to crave that information,  it opens all kinds of doors where you provide those details that you initially suppressed.