Ricordando Firenze (Remembering Florence)
Oil on Panel
22”x24”
I walked the streets of Florence, early mornings, late afternoon, camera in hand, watchful for images. Truth to tell, I have always been drawn to images that light and dark play important roles. Does that mean making Chiaroscuro the theme of this show “cheating”? Maybe so.
Ask me if I care?
Secret courtyards, peeling walls and dramatic shadows. Looking for inspiration at the edges of day and night gives me ammunition for my creative quiver. “Don’t paint a wall like you’re painting a wall,” my graduate school mentor Jacob Lawrence always used to say. Unless, of course, it is a shaggy, crumbling, peeling wall. Italy creates it’s own patinas on it’s surfaces.
Unexpected news stirs up memories.
Yesterday I learned that the school I got my BFA from, all those many decades ago, is closing at the end of next week. The closing of University of the Arts was the sudden end of an era.
There is an unfortunate logic to the announcement, if not to the suddenness of UArts demise. Costs of tuition are up, enrollment is down. The pandemic kicked the legs out from under small educational institutions without massive endowments.
When I was a student, it was Philadelphia College of Art, concentrating in visual art only: painting, sculpture, illustration, graphic and industrial design. Before that it was the Philadelphia Museum School. It was not the oldest art school in the area, that honor goes to The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, which, ironically, is also closing at the end of the 2024-25 academic school year.
The current student debt crisis has a lot to do with this, I think.
I went to school long enough ago (never mind how long ago, smarty pants)that even as a scholarship/work study/loan student, I was not left in horrific debt. Loans were federal low interest loans, tuition was relatively cheap, you could live with roommates close to school for around $100/month. Even painting students with little chance of getting one of those stability inducing university teaching gigs could manage to pay back their loans from our restaurant/retail jobs we got in order to not overshadow our dreams of being a successful (i.e. solvent) artist.
But today? Today tuition at a decent art school can run you $50,000 a year or more, and that’s not even taking housing into account. One of the things I loved about my art school education was it forced me to learn about styles of art I was not naturally drawn to. It taught me to learn from multiple schools of thought and from the vast history of art. I had opportunities to study with working artists, with art historians. I learned to see more completely and deeply than I would have left to follow only my personal dates and inclinations.
I used to encourage people to go to art school, but now? I can’t in good conscience encourage people to go $200,000 or more in debt to be a struggling artist. And not only are the current and about to start in the fall of 2024 students suddenly cut adrift. The faculty is suddenly without employment. The possibilities for secure jobs with a steady salary and benefits, which was already abysmal, just got worse.
I never did score one of those coveted teaching gigs, though when I was getting out of graduate school with my freshly minted MFA, I did try. If I got a response at all to my applications, they were form letters along the lines of “Thank you for being one of 700 applicants to this one year interim adjunct position at Trenton State University.”*
*real response.
This leaves us with the question: what is the value of original art or creative thought?
I’ll leave for another time the discussion about the theft of the work of artists, musicians and writers to train and “create” the abomination that is A.I.
Are we abandoning creativity by cutting off avenues for learning? There are other ways to learn to be a painter or a writer or a dancer. They will perhaps be more difficult, but I’m not sure that is necessarily a bad thing. I don’t know that it is a good thing either. Did the proliferation of art programs make it too easy to get an arts education? Does making it harder leave learning art to only the wealthy elite?
I am going on longer than I planned, so maybe I will save the rest of this discussion for another post. If you are a painter, writer, illustrator, etc working now, where did you learn to do what you do? Do you think it helped or hindered you?
Beautiful wall. Thanks for sharing. Read recently that colleges are closing at a rate of one per week. One of my best friends is a college president & it’s very difficult hearing what she has to say on the topic. Quite a challenge, in many respects.
I got my start at UArts too, in a way — their video editing class in the (now defunct) Continuing Education department really enabled me to pull a 180 after undergrad and let me launch a career in a new field. Even tangentially, UArts has impacted so many.
The school has been so present in Philly’s art scene for so long (as a source of young talent, a place for artists to pick up teaching gigs when they could, as a gallery, as a venue for non-UArts classes and performances) that I really think the city will be a poorer place without it. But you’re absolutely right that the rise in tuition has not been commensurate with graduates’ salaries. True in so many fields, of course, but perhaps especially cruel for artists, who ought to have the flexibility to experiment, and fail, and try again, without the crushing pressure of overwhelming debt right out of the gate.
To say nothing of the immediate impact — I keep bumping into folks around town who are in shock. Really cruel for students, faculty, staff to learn through a newspaper article late on a Friday that their future plans are just done. Just so poorly handled.
Seeing your poignant painting brings me some comfort, though. The foundations already laid aren’t going anywhere, and the artists are gonna be out here doing their thing for the world.