Brian is a student from Parsons The New School of Design. He’s currently a freshman and is unsure what field of art he wants to study. I interviewed him on his thoughts about art.
Q: Tell me how you got started in art. Was there an event or period in your life that led you to want to pursue art, like attending an art school?
A: I forgot. I mean how do you exactly start in art? Don’t all children fundamentally start doing art when they’re little? Aren’t we all artists? I don’t think there was an exact event that got me started in art. But making art is just a habit from childhood for me and I decided that I wanted to make money from doing something I like.
Q: Is there a particular type of art you prefer more then others?
A: Right now I’m really into installation art, which uses the space around viewers in an exhibition. Rather then being a visual art piece, usually the art is conceptual or doing an action. I recently went to a James Turlock exhibit in the Guggenheim. He transformed the space within the Guggenheim into an art piece. It was essentially a light show and he transformed a spiral inside the Guggenheim into a giant light tunnel. I find that form of art interesting because I find we live in a culture that is saturated with media that can be accessed instantly. When we’re living in a culture like that, visual art isn’t as spectacular or as important as it once was in the past. Why bother going to the Louvre to look at the Mona Lisa ten feet away when you can have a 300 dpi print of it on your computer? To me installation art transforms art into an experience rather then something visual.
Q: Where do you find your inspiration for art?
A: I don’t believe in inspiration. Instead I believe that all artists pull from references that they found within their mind and create through that. Every artist has their own repertoire that they pull ideas from. Recently I did a project on shadows and I decided to base it off of Commedia dell’Arte’s, Perriot, the sad clown. I mixed multiple references into my art project and that essentially creates something innovated.
Q: How is your experience at Parsons The New School of Design so far?
A: Honestly, I don’t really like it because of the community. I find many of the students there aren’t artist but rather stylists. They copy other people’s ideas and use it as their own. They also lack references to different artists. But the thing that annoys me the most is that some people are ignorant about the world because they’re wealthy and privileged. I also don’t like that the techniques and things I’m learning in class, I already know. The teachers are just teaching the basics like form, foreground, gesture and figure drawings, which I learned during high school taking outside courses.
Q: Do you think that art is more talent or from learning?
A: Drawing is more learning based, where you learn the techniques and concepts of shapes and shading. But the actual creation of concepts is something that you have to be born with. You need to take things around you and transform them into something new.
Q: Before attending your current school, you went a high school that specialized in math and science, how do you feel about the sudden change to an art and design school?
A: Parsons is a design school, so it’s a dramatically different change. I think the thing with math and science schools is that you have to follow a set of rules to achieve certain goals and grades. In that sense the workload is much less because it is all based on predetermined knowledge. While in an art school, there is more experimentation and more of a demand for you to create new ideas. Therefore you need to have a great deal of creativity and in a sense more thought and brainstorming to create something new. I definitely like this type of thinking better because it’s easier to have ideas flow through you rather then doing a monotonous math problem or taking a test on facts that you crammed for in the morning.
Q: Is there a field or major you intend to study?
A: I think I’m either doing fine arts or fashion designing, since Parsons is known for its fashion designing. When someone goes into the art field, the reality is most people don’t make a lot of money. My thought is that I might as well go into fine arts because I get more freedom on the type of art I can create.
Q: What do you enjoy the most at school? What do you find most difficult about it?
A: The most difficult thing is getting all my assignments done on time. I procrastinate way too much. I like to blog, play video games and read Lady Gaga forums instead of working on projects. The thing that I enjoy the most is the prompts and guidelines for assignments because it gives me parameters and reasons to create something. I feel like teachers are challenging me to create something and sometimes I have to get out of my comfort zone to try to complete the task.
Q: Where do you see art taking you in the future?
A: I want a career in the art field. Ideally I would want to be paid for my ideas and the things I create. That is essentially what every artist wants, but I am better then the average artist.
