Professor Chris Matusek’s piece, “Stuck,” is part of a faculty art exhibit in the F building.
By Sarah Schudt, Arts & Entertainment Editor
Art takes time, hard work, and a lot of patience. But as a student, when all you can compare your own work to is finished projects, it’s easy to grow discouraged.
The exhibit, “Maker’s Mind Art Faculty From Moraine Valley,” seeks to change that. Running until Jan. 31 in the Robert F. DeCaprio Art Gallery, the annual exhibition features work from Moraine Valley’s art faculty, most of which draws attention to the process of making art.
“I’m noticing an increase in students feeling the need to only show work during critique that they think is ‘final and perfect,’” says professor Chris Matusek says.
The “Makers Mind” exhibit takes viewers into the creative process.
“In the beginning of your career, you’re learning to express yourself, to learn about visual communication, and how all the design principles come together to create a single work. You need to show us the process so that we can discuss what’s working and what’s not, what’s successful and what’s not successful, so that we can guide you.”
For this exhibit, Matusek submitted a series of drawings she completed over the month of October, for a yearly challenge called “Inktober.”
“I set a series of personal guidelines to follow for each daily drawing that were meant to reinforce self-discovery and experimentation, improve my acceptance of imperfection, discover how to reframe perceived failure and success, to create a focus on process over the product, learn from guided challenges, and grasp new skills quickly,” she says.
Her artwork is not meant to be finished. It is meant to help her draw quickly and enjoy doing it, which helps her learn to enjoy the process of making art.
Professor Erik LaGattuta also emphasized process in his six-page comic work “Prologue.”
“[The comics] started out as demonstrations for my Drawing Comics class,” says LaGattuta, “but they changed and become part of my own work as much as they were demonstrations for my class.
“I have the chance to show not just the finished inks on three of them, but four more that are in progress, which I thought was really nice. It’s a nice way for [students] to see the drawing before it’s finished.”
Professor Edyta Pavulska describes the process of creating her photographs on Instagram.
Half of his pages are complete with crisp, black line art and fine hand lettering. The other half is sketchy and unfinished.
“I find that a big part of teaching is letting students know that it is not only okay but expected that their work goes through certain stages that simply take time,” LaGattuta said.
Professor Edyta Pavulska submitted a trio of photographs of her children in viking costumes—something that may seem simple at first.
However, it took Pavulska a great deal of time and effort to pull it off.
“That project took a lot,” says Pavulska, “I started with my kids. We took the Amazon boxes, cut out big circles and painted them. We found Halloween decorations for the swords, then I gave them haircuts specifically for this. It was really cold, and we went outside without proper jackets, and then we took pictures.”
“Sometimes you take nice pictures and that’s it,” she adds. “In this case it was much more.”
No piece of art in this exhibit, no matter how simple or easy it may look, was created without effort. This exhibit brings that fact to the forefront.
