Manifesting Your Mess

From Vesperisms Season 3, Episode 2, April 2022

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Greetings and Salutations, and welcome to Vesperisms: The Art of Thinking for Yourself. I’m here to help you recalibrate toward an artistic worldview. So grab your coffee, and have a seat in my studio, and let’s have a chat. This is Season 3, Episode 2, Manifesting Your Mess.

This past year, I came on board as faculty at School of Visual Arts, teaching illustration portfolio to university seniors. It’s been nothing but wonderful. I really love the students and am thrilled to my toes to see their progress each week and over the course of the year. They have all grown as artists and communicators, some of them coming out of their shells in bold ways. I adore teaching—it’s been a lifelong dream of mine. The fact that I get to do it at my alma mater is even more of a gift.

Now, over the last 20-something years, since I graduated from Parsons with my BFA in Illustration, I’ve been a visiting artist at a number of art schools. And I’m sad to say that I’ve noticed, overall, a dramatic decline in the quality of student work, specifically of drawing. When I was in school, it was around the time that a lot of schools saw the writing on the wall and came to understand that they needed to embrace digital illustration if they were to send competitive graduates out into the field. I had graduated more or less at the beginning of that wave, becoming very good at Photoshop, and I’m glad for that. But I saw schools divest from their classical, technique-based educational structures and invest in multi-million dollar labs—which was fine—but also in fancy, hi-tech building facades to lure people in to the kingdom they were creating. My own alma mater, Parsons, did a multi-million dollar renovation in 2008, which includes new galleries and an alienating, Disneyfied, neon and chrome lobby with ubiquitous screens, but they did virtually nothing to the actual classrooms, which look exactly as crusty as they did when I graduated 10 years before, only with new laptops and projectors. And let me just say, when it comes to art school, I personally think the crustiness is the point.

Meanwhile, when I visited Parsons and other schools as a guest, I noticed that the drawing quality declined to the point that I sometimes felt like I was looking at 8th grade work, not the results of four years of education at one of the top 5 art schools in the country. The facade and the tools got more sophisticated. But, I’m sorry to say, the art did not get better.