Spoiler alert: I am an art critic and social historian, living a secret life. As Paul Cezanne once cautioned, “Don’t be an art critic, paint, there lies salvation. And with that admonition clearly in mind, I attend the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts (Connecticut), above, Senior Studio Exhibit each year, hoping to remember why I chose to begin painting that many years ago, and why now, decades later, I find redemption in the work of young painters. This esteemed academic bastion of classical art training, located just a few steps (literally!) from the Florence Griswold Museum—one-time retreat for Connecticut Impressionists, the likes of Twachtman, Hassam and Metcalf—continues to turn out some of the brightest and the best young artists in the country. Each receives their degree in May, eager to set out on a particular career that historically defies the odds: that of a working and successful artist. artes fine arts magazine

This year, three young artists, in particular, caught my eye in the school’s gallery. No surprise, each was an award recipient in the opinion of the faculty and staff at graduation time, for each has their distinctive style and an approach to their work that belies their age and somewhat limited real-world experience. But, when new grads, Jeremy Horseman, Lucian Goff and Emma Kindall sat down with me to talk about their approach to art and their reasons for choosing the perilous road to artistic prominence, the links that attracted me to their work in the galley show became clearer.

A question I frequently ask any artist I speak with is: Why art as a life pursuit, and not physics, or social work, or computer programming? Without exception, from the most notable in the world to those just beginning the journey, the answer is nearly always the same: “I don’t feel like I had another choice. Mark-making and visual imagination has always just been part of who I was.” This conversation, too, became a chance to learn more about both the deeply personal and intellectual reasons behind the inspiration for their art.

Lucian Goff’s striking sculpture in the Senior Studio Exhibit gallery, Woman in a Winter Coat (2013), polychrome on clay, 42″, left, portrays a young woman, standing awkwardly, but unhesitatingly in a down parka, zipped to the neck. She is naked from the waist down, her genitals in clear, unobstructed view. The left hand is raised slightly, as if frozen at a moment of alarm or embarrassment. The toes of the left foot, similarly, are curling slightly upward in that same uncertain stance of shyness, or awkwardness. Her head, and gaze, are directed away from the viewer, to the lower, right. Mounted on a small pedestal, the visitor finds him or herself alone and in an unobstructed interaction with this 42” tall, life-like figure. Daring, yet modest and unashamed, Goff’s exploration of the human form simultaneously addresses the empowered feminine psyche and the masculine impulse to voyeurism. The viewer and the solitary figure are instantly engaged in a dance with profound psycho-social and political ramifications.

The power of the male gaze is key to Goff’s interpretation of this figure, just as it had become a distinctive feature of modernist painters, beginning in the mid-18th century. Recognizing the interaction with the viewer humanized the narrative, transitioning the human figure for the allegorical realm and dropping squarely in the here-and-now—an immediate visual dialogue between artist, subject and viewer—becoming, as it were, a validation of individuality in an age when landscape no longer served as the subject, but rather a backdrop for the emerging modern ‘individual.’

While stating that he “brings a certain objectivity to the work,” he points out that, “the experience of gazing voyeuristically at a nude figure can be both inviting and unsettling as we become aware of our position as onlookers…I create a tension found in the interaction between the viewer and the objectified female.” But as Edgar Degas was always quick to point out to his intrepid critics, there is a difference between ‘nude’ and ‘naked,’ the former serving aesthetic objectives, while the latter is prurient in intent. Goff walks a fine line between the two, asking the viewer to examine the work, while checking any traces of vicarious pleasure at the door on the way in.

Like the contemporary photography of Rineke Dijkstra, who seeks out the haunts of European youth (clubs, beaches, military recruitment centers, maternity wards, parks, to name a few) in search of young people on the verge of adulthood who are willing to pose for her camera, Goff captures the same sense of discomfort and emerging sensuality that accompanies bodies on the cusp of entering an emotionally-complex, sexually-charged world. For Dijkstra, the gaze—sometimes returned to the camera, sometimes not—becomes the central empowering gesture for the subject, and the one that reaches past the surface of the photo to engage the viewer. For Goff, his figure’s eyes are averted to a spot in the lower distance, suggesting that the provocation arising from direct engagement might still be too emotionally burdened. While Goff’s other works in clay demonstrate acute powers of direct observation that can delve the human spirit, the central work in the exhibit, Woman in a Winter Coat presents further opportunity for the artist to explore the highly charged physical and emotional space between the object and the viewer, so often fraught with stifling cultural mores and onerous societal sanctions.

Emma Kindall wears her heart on her sleeve in a powerful series of multi-media works, consisting of figures occupying build landscapes that are, “in, not of it.” In a post-Apocalyptic world of her own fabrication, broken and dysfunctional children and adults stare in apparent disbelief at their surroundings. Like a world still occupied by a handful of intrepid survivors, where life must go on in these fractured spaces, walls and doors, roofs and windows cant perilously, adding vertiginous, disorienting planes to the overall scene. “My figures are emotional survivors, disconnected from reality, yet still trying to fit in to an imperfect world.”

Her mixed media works serve as mnemonic Cabinets of Curiosities, where memories of people and places long gone are imperfectly reconstructed for the sake of maintaining a personal history, at any cost. Kindall’s struggle to find redemptive strength through this process of visual recall carries a burden: her works are hard to look at, for no other reason that they strike a chord for the viewer—an implied, shared biography that binds us—but might remain unconsciously buried for most. It remains for Kindall to do the hard work of resurfacing these memories, presenting them in bold, unapologetic form.

Her works evoke images of another artist who struggled with a collective unconscious, one with far-reaching implication for American society—Romare Bearden. This African-American artist from the `50s employed collage and other mediums to great effect, propelling the plight of Black Americans into public consciousness. His Projections series ‘painted’ an unvarnished truth about life as a black man in the ghettos of American cities and on farms in the deep South. Through the medium of collage, he also constructed a beautiful narrative of folklore and tradition that salved racial pain within black communities and raised awareness for those willfully blinded to the issues. Kindall’s agenda is not dissimilar, though on a much more personal scale.

She admits to being greatly influenced by Bearden, finding his work “disturbing, but inspiring.” Like a bricoleur, her work, right, Little Six (2013),mixed media, 24 x 30”, and others on view appear spontaneous, intuitive and homemade. “Melancholic, handmade pictures, taped together, falling apart, and fractured—reflect my life experience. I grew up in a loosely-held-together home along side loosely-held-together people dealing with different levels of brokenness.” She gathers discarded materials: cardboard, old wood, peeling paint, string and old wallpaper. Some of these found objects carry associations to her childhood: the walls of her grandmother’s home or the taped-together chandelier above the childhood dinner table. She combine memory with medium to reconstruct the recurring content of homes, disconnected families and domestic motifs into powerful visual language of her own. Kendall is coming to terms with her past in ways that can only be called poignant and redemptive.

Jeremy Horseman‘s approach to his work as a painter aspires to stimulate conversation, at the point where “symbol and narrative emerge.” Adopting a more cerebral view of the painting process than many other young artists, Horseman believes he is not in search of a specific meaning in his work. Yet, he works in paint, resin, crayon and charcoal, with occasional hidden collage elements to construct layered images that seem replete with meaning, when encountering his work for the first time. His paintings resonate with messaging, melding allegory and fact, myth and symbolism, ancient imagery with artifacts of modern life. “I am interested in constructing allegories of cotemporary world history, suggesting themes of spirituality, evolution and war. Driven by the overwhelming beauty and terror of cultural dynamics and global conflict, I construct narratives inspired by primitive and ancient art forms.”

And like the ancients, motivated by a desire to understand the natural forces surrounding them, Horseman’s work also addresses the permeable boundaries between earthly existence, the blue dome of heaven, above, and a dark, torturous underworld. Right, Worshipers, 2013, transfer print on newspaper, oil and acrylic paints, shellac on panel 21.5″x 11″. His is a visual construct, where life under a veil of war wreaks havoc and destruction beneath a blood-red sky; where angelic figures constructed of torn newspaper, bearing fragments of today’s headlines, drift heaven-ward against an ink-black background; where survivors, shrunken and mournful, are left to inhabit a devastated, Hieronymus Bosch-inspired landscape. Horseman appears to be asking the question: Is this a world so impeded by the machines of war, that mere survival becomes the least desirable option?

A large painting, Galaxy Fishers (2012), below right, oil and acrylic paints, crayon, goldleaf on panel, 48″x 72″, hangs prominently in the Senior Studio Exhibition gallery. Consistent with the artist’s obfuscation of cultural chronology, the work consists of imagery drawn from 3,000 years of recorded history. Represented in a style which evokes the polychromatic style of 6th century (B.C.E.) Greek ceramic painters, two prominent figures and their shadowy doppelgänger counterparts are portrayed casting nets of abstracted shapes over a stylized pool of black. Behind and beneath them, clear blue seas and sky are filled with a frenzied swirl of biomorphic shapes. In the lower left, human figures, beneath the feet of one fisherman, seem bathed in a field of celestial light.

To the right, morphing sea creatures escape the nets to rise skyward and, finally, in the upper left, as if in a last, deadly evolutionary transformation, fighter jets ominously chris-crossing over an otherwise lyrical scene. Only a narrow spit of land appears to break this perpetual cycle of life and death. The work serves as a powerful metaphor for the fragile state of the world, while also eulogizing a simpler time in our collective history, but one in which we were no less dependent on Earth’s resources for our survival.

Horseman’s material exploration is yielding a complex, multi-faceted body of work. His stated goal, as an artist is “to start a conversation.” His unique assimilation of materials, ancient and modern symbolism, differing styles and motifs, all aimed at creating a thoughtful narrative about our fragile relationship to our own existence on a fragile planet, is a big order to fill. But, as a post-modernist, the political and intellectual climate is heating up for a dialogue like the one he is crafting in the studio. An observer of Horseman’s work might hastily conclude that his messaging is one of trepidation and fear of what human nature has in store for us; but on closer examination of his recent body of work, another reality becomes evident: a persistent and tenacious quality in humankind to seek the divine spirit in us all.

I leave these young, aspiring artists with a final thought by early-20th century writer, Willa Cather: “Artistic growth is, more than anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the great artist knows how difficult it is.”

By Richard Friswell, Managing Editor