Thesis thoughts

Hey Stranger!

It’s October and my work is in full swing with thesis. I want to review a bit about my process with thesis in preparation for writing my thesis next semester. This is going to be all over the place, as usual. Also much of what I yap about in here may not make sense because stranger, I don’t know how much knowledge you have about wood and oil paint, but maybe you’ll get curious and want to know more. This is more just going to be a lengthy bit of me processing what I’m doing—fair warning.

Liminal space is an undefined space between two realities, they can be concrete such as life and death or something more ambiguous. I began to ask myself the question of: Can mind be a liminal space? Which led to>>Can memory be a liminal space? I believe that recalling different times in your life begins to feel like you are in two places at once: You are reliving the memory and feel it playing out in your head and at the same time, you are in the present, which creates this mental nexus, and usually what happens when people reach this moment they are presented with a choice: to ruminate on the memory and hold it close to chest or completely shut it out and dissociate from it. Humans struggle with memory because it’s one of the intimate parts of yourself that only YOU have access to. Someone who experienced something with you can remember it vastly different, so each of us have a unique way of recalling experiences. My thesis is an exploration of my own memories and retelling them as a means of keeping these memories alive and allowing myself to feel and grieve them, I am focusing on experiences that feel simultaneously like a lifetime ago and like they just happened yesterday. This is my effort to reconnect with myself.

One of my “unique” ways of remembering is what shows up in my dreams/night terrors. I’ve had night terrors since I was a young child. Ever since moving states, all my night terrors take place in my childhood home. I can retell every detail about the house I grew up in and the land as well. I can mentally walk through the house and visualize it exactly the way it looked and felt. My subconscious has held onto that house, it haunts me in a way. I could be dreaming about something that does not involve that house at all, but the dream takes place in the house. I write about my dreams often.

I began my research and ideation for this piece doing two things: 1) I went through old photo albums with my mom and anything that made me feel something I had her send to me. While that box was in transit in the mail, I collaborated with a photographer to begin doing my reference photos. 2) I went on airbnb and I looked for hours and hours at different houses, looking for something that even just resembled the house I grew up in a little bit. I managed to find a house an hour away that brought that same something up in me. It had the exact same colors on the exterior: a white house with green trim all along the siding and windows with a shed in the backyard that looked so much like the 2 stall barn I had as a kid in the prairie. It was built around the same time as my childhood home was: the 1980’s. I booked it for a night and then me and my photographer went out there and spent a whole 24 hours shooting.

When we first got there, I did a walkthrough by myself and I took so many notes and sketched out the rooms. I interacted with the house for 2 hours. I had about 9-12 pages of notes for my photographer and then I “gave a tour” to her. During my walkthrough, I felt so nostalgic and I had many memories come up for me. So the house was doing exactly what I was looking for.

When we began taking photos, I was not quite sure EXACTLY what kind of images I wanted. I was mostly focused on atmosphere and space and “seeing what would happen”. I knew I wanted chiaroscuro lighting. We ended up doing about 4 different shoots. The first one was meant to feel dark and nightmarish, the second one ended up being more nostalgic (we even went to multiple thrift stores to find objects of nostalgia: a set of old VHS childhood films, toys, etc) and the third was focused on disconnecting from my body/mind. These are three states of mind that feel liminal for me to experience. The 4th was just taking photos of the exterior and the town nearby.

I spent weeks going through all these photos and figuring out what The Shot was to paint. and then I got the childhood photos in the mail, scanned them into my computer, and that’s when my first idea really started to take form: I wanted to paint my adult self interacting with my childhood self, because sometimes when I look through old pictures, it feels like she is me and has always been there, like I am still the exact same little girl as I was. So I chose a childhood picture and photoshopped it into a bunch of different photos until I finally had a hit.

While I was doing this, I was also beginning to build all my surfaces. Over the summer, I realized I love working on wood more than canvas, so I was committed to learning how to build all my own wood panels. I made a 4x6ft cradled panel and got it up on my wall and could finally begin the first painting. I did a study beforehand to figure out my color scheme. By now mid October, I am about halfway done with the first piece, and it’s going very well. There’s some minor compositional issues that I’m figuring out but nothing too crazy. I’ve taken in progress shots, uploaded them to photoshop to move things around and see plan out how I can make my composition stronger. I plan to go back and make these changes once I am solid on what I want changed. This helps me not waste time, because I could have started immediately making changes on surface and discovered ‘hmm no this isn’t working’ and I’d be spending even more time fixing.

The issues I have been having is within my process of building surfaces. And it is driving me actually crazy. My first panel went ok, it took a while because my bevel cuts for the cradle were not perfect 45 degrees so they did not fit together perfectly and I had to correct a lot of mistakes, I had help though. Time consuming. Another issue is the conditions of my studio: the community studio I am in is SO humid and cold that it has caused excessive warping in all plywood sheets I’ve bought. I’ve made the mistake of not building immediately and letting the sheets sit in the studio too long. I had rented a U haul truck and bought 2 1/4inch 10 foot sheets and then 1x1’s for the cradle and within a day, all were warping so badly. So the result is my first panel has some noticeable warping on one side, even after building the cradle and adding in corner supports and center bars. The other sheet was even worse, so I ended up cutting it on the table saw down to 20 smaller pieces so I can build smaller panels to practice getting comfortable doing the process. After that, I rented the U haul truck again and ended up buying 2 3/4inch 10 foot sheets. I decided to not cradle these because of the weight, but instead, cut it to size and use all the excess to make French cleats and spacers for the back. After fastening the cleats and the spacers, I gesso’d one panel and the result: EXCESSIVE WARPING, even with gesso on the back side. I’ve worked a lot with plywood, especially over the summer and I have never seen thicker plywood warp so much. So now, the sheet that I just processed is potentially unusable because even with it up on the wall, the warping is so visible. However, after really analyzing it and having people look at it, I know what went wrong. Besides the humidity in the community studio space, I gesso’d the panels using a paint sprayer. To avoid clogging the nozzle of the sprayer, I added about 15-25% water to my container of gesso to thin it down. I was so focused on not clogging the nozzle, that I overlooked the factor that I was adding even more moisture to the wood, and it warped on all sides. I have to decide whether to try adding vertical bracing or cradle the 3/4 inch panel. There’s risks to all choices, I could also try fully gessoing the back side with water added too and try to “reverse warp” it and then brace it. I want to try to avoid cradling it because it’s already so heavy. But I also don’t want to waste time and do more gesso and more bracing if it is going to not work.

I still have to do the other sheet. I am planning out a lot to prevent the warping on this next one and I have to decide: do I stick to 1/4inch cradling or can I prevent warping on 3/4inch? I’m using the weekend to decide before I get a replacement sheet for my final piece.

The Sunday at 1am update: I brought in a second pair of hands to French cleat and vertically brace the third piece, it is warped but it’s not nearly as bad as the other one. I plan to gesso differently this time! I’m going to try just using a roller and no water. This will also be a little more convenient for me because, stranger, I can’t use a paint sprayer in my studio, I have to put my massive surfaces on a plywood cart and cart them down the hall to a spray room and spend 2-3 days in and out transporting back and forth doing multiple layers. At least now, I can use a roller in my studio and it will have slightly less environment changes because wood is constantly moving and expanding. I’m trying to learn to work with those changes and not fight them, but plan ahead. It’s been a “learning the hard way the whole way” experience. It’s also nice because I can gesso it up on the wall it’s going to be painted on anyways. The biggest downside is, it will take longer to get all my layers of gessoing done because I have to wait 12 hours for each layer to dry before adding more, so 4-5 days of work just doing that. Acrylic gesso can crack otherwise; whereas with the spray room there’s a fan and I was getting all my layers done in a day. But also, the fan making it so cold probably made the second one warp too. So many factors have to be considered with wood, it can be inconvenient during a learning curve. But I’m excited because I really know these skills are so functional for my career.

The main stressor however, is I only have 5 months left to do 3 4x6ft paintings by the way. And my body is overworked and crashing, I had whooping cough a few weeks ago because there was an outbreak on campus and if you’ve ever known me, you know my immune system is garbage. So the building process has been incredibly expensive in terms of money, my body, and time causing me excessive stress and now pain. I have the other two paintings already planned, the studies for them are already started, I just need my other two surfaces up on the wall so I can spend all my time just on working these three until March. I’m having to accept the chances that these will not be fully dry and varnished in time for the MFA showcase. Oil paint, especially when it is applied in very opaque layers, needs about six months of dry time before varnishing, and well stranger, I have 5 months and I’m on the first one still.

I just did a final shoot for my last idea and this one went much smoother because I had a clear idea in mind. My committee wanted me to really push my skillset in terms of composition because it’s one of my noticeably weaker skills. I think the imagery for the second piece and third piece is much stronger than the first because they are planned out to the last detail. So I am feeling antsy and wanting to start them now but i’m still stuck being so behind in prepping my surfaces.

I had a 1:1 meeting with one of my committee members yesterday and she said she was quite impressed. I think nobody expected me to be building all my own surfaces. My choice came from my love of knowing when an artist had a hand in every single step of their process. I just deeply appreciate that labor of love. It also comes from wanting the best quality surface. She re-enforced that I am very clearly doing a lot of work and that I’m doing well. I tend to be very hard on myself and have high expectations of myself. It comes from a radical belief in what I’m doing and what I’m capable of. I like to see things through and be consistent, even when I am falling apart mentally and physically. I see this within myself outside of art as well. When there are big problems, I don’t just give up and throw away. I push because I know most things are fixable if I am putting in the work. I tend to need to fuck up, cry and completely fall apart, then I make a plan and I start knocking it out/getting back on track. It works in my art (for now), but not with real life things, because it acts as a cycle and is not sustainable for myself. I have spent a lot of time thinking about the ways I want to make the cycle less emotionally and physically overbearing to me. Setting extremely high expectations and forcing myself to see it through causes me an excessive amount of burnout. And right now, how much i’m working on this, I am fully expecting to hit burnout in the middle of painting these. It will be worth it because I will have learned an insane amount and I keep thinking “I just need to get through thesis and then I can crashout for a bit and then focus on re-balancing again” but in my undergrad this also happened. My last semester of undergrad was ugly and I was struggling the whole way through. I don’t want that to also be next semester. But I’m noticing myself justifying expecting that to happen so I need to overwork now. But not changing the way I work now, I will pay the price later. That’s the tradeoff. Lots to think about.

So there it is stranger, I feel like I have no time, and i’ve already cried to both my committee and my studio mates about it and everyone keeps re-enforcing that I got this and I am this total badass that always manages to get things done but to be honest, I feel like I’m being slow cooked in a crockpot. I’m cooked!