In the movie The Fabelmans, Stephen Spielberg recounted how he first met John Ford who told him to make film he had to understand art and pictorial composition. Frank gave me a lesson on pictorial tension on my first day at the Arts Student League.
Before Frank walking into class that night, I was ready w how to book on oil painting. But Frank explained the difference between a curtain and a painting and the respect for the four corners of the pictorial frame which is making them the same would be boring but having them being different would excite the eyes.
It made immediate sense.
I had completed my MBA at NYU and was very anxious to return to Art. It was either leaving TIAA-CREF to go downtown to join the big boys on Wall Street/a dot com start up or stay to have an artistic life after 5 PM. My friend Marya Mazor had introduced me to Jean Wagner, a theater director, when I first came to NYC. Jean saw my frustration of having left sculpture after Amherst to go get a paying job and suggested that I join Carol Fox Prescott , a prolific acting teacher, who had started a class for non actors on Returning to Creativity using her same renowned principles taught to her students on breath and joy. Carol exposed me to Art from a non studio solitary perspective which I immediately fell in love. She introduced me to theatrical exercises as ways to explore new dimensions in creation and feelings in a group setting.
Just like studying sculpture at Amherst, the humanistic dimension would draw me to do the next thing. While I was prolific at creating computer systems to manage $ atTIAA, the possibilities of doing more couldn't be ignored. Carol took me into new realm of artistic experiences beyond what I had learned in studio creation at Amherst . She introduced me to Rob O'Neil , a dancer who now starting to teach using the same dimension of breath and joy. I couldn't pass up because club dancing had become my obsession started from my days after Amherst in Boston. 80's 45 dance LP was the rage and I learned to freely dance uninhibitedly on the club floor to the pulsing house /industrial music.
Rob had ideas similar to Carol in taking non dancers and trained them to move in space. He called it Embodiment.
Once I had learned how to put my body in physical space, next stop would be in non physical space.
I found the Arts Student League which has taught Arts at night to many students who work in the day. I flipped through all of instructors' bios to select which teacher to study and then pay by the month to attend. Frank said he would teach structure of Painting and Painting is Space.
Not exactly knew what he meant but I was looking for something more than a computer screen and a virtual digital life on the internet. I needed a structure way to understand painting and what makes a painting great.
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