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Studio art professor Sarah Buie is a designer whose primary interest is in museum exhibition design. She creates three-dimensional spaces that help visitors experience a given topic in the most complete way possible. |
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Meet the artists:
“Happy accidents” and the creative process
Interview with Joe Perna
Studio art major Joe Perna '01 describes the creative process he used to develop
a series of paintings, and how he used research to guide his work. See
Joe’s piece “Happiness” in
Clark’s Admissions House on Maywood Street or view it on-line.
How do you do research
for a piece of art?
A lot of research does go
into every piece. My ideas are usually based on an experience I’ve
had or something I’ve seen. The art department at Clark really
encourages you to go out and research your idea any way you can – go
look at work like it or similar to it to give yourself a base of
knowledge to work from. Whether it’s an emotion or an object, I also
do research simply by spending time with my idea, really observing it
and getting to know it before I ever put pen to paper. Many times
it’s instinct, and unlike writing a paper where the process is very
structured, with art I always feel much freer to try different things
and totally go in a different direction as I’m painting. That’s
research. The experience is doing it. You gain new information as you
paint. And you have a lot of happy accidents!
You have a piece
called “Happiness” on display in Clark’s Admissions House.
What process did you go through to create that work?
I started with
the question, what is happiness? I chose to explore that by asking
other people what they thought. I designed a survey and gave it to 150
Clark students and faculty asking them to associate happiness with
each of the 5 senses. For example, what does it taste like, feel
like…I got some great responses.
How did you use the
surveys?
I painted from them. They
were my tools and materials. After reading them, I asked
myself how I could represent all these ideas. What materials would
work best? Oils? Watercolor? What size should it be? I think a lot
about what effect the piece will have on the viewer.
What
was the final result?
I came up with a series of three
paintings based on the responses to the surveys. In the first panel I
used Polaroids I took of each survey respondent and pulled out a
thought or idea that I found interesting and wrote that at the bottom
of the photo. This panel is a grid of these Polaroids and words.
Then I wanted the third panel
to correspond with the first. It’s also a grid. But this time I
pulled out statements that struck me from the surveys. For example,
someone wrote, “Happiness is love, joy and peace,” so I used the
phrase. Someone else talked about happiness as a sunset, so I painted
a sunset. The whole grid contains this mixture of words and visuals
depending on how I thought the feeling and idea could be best
communicated.
But then there were more
ambiguous concepts like “contentment” in the surveys. That’s
harder to get a hold of. I did some reading about abstract
expressionism to help me tackle it. The middle panel ended up being this
one large image that for me, is geared to feelings of contentment.
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Additional Resources
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