Endnotes¹


Anya Pertel
  • *
    •

    Artwork

    1
    2
    3
    4
    5
    6
    103 Bad Paintings
    Acrylic paint, gouache, and plastic gemstones on paper and unstretched canvas

    Statement This thesis project is not really a “thesis” project at all. These little paintings all come from a studio exercise that I began doing in the fall of 2019 and have picked up again this year, which I have lovingly termed the “bad paintings”—paintings made quickly and intuitively, without preciousness or fear. This practice came out of a place of deep ambivalence, of trying to renegotiate my relationship with art and school and budding adulthood. Fear of making bad art had made me nearly stop making art at all, so I had to remind myself that painting is fun. And that I love it. I had an art teacher tell me once that everyone is full of bad paintings, and the only way to make good paintings is to get all the bad paintings out of your system, so I decided to start the purging process. I was taking a semester off school when I began making my “bad paintings”—living in an apartment alone for the first time, working multiple jobs in a new city, making a bad painting everyday (somedays forcing myself to), stretching and re-stretching canvas over the same ten stretcher bars, slowly amassing a pile. The privacy of making paintings in a tiny room in a tiny apartment away from school showed me how to play, how to fail and how to fall in love with that failure. How to create an ethos of failure. I started making my “bad paintings” again after the pandemic and more time off, trying to figure out how to paint again in a world that I felt I didn’t know anymore. I still don’t know, and I learned that I probably never will but will just have to paint anyway. In a few months I’ll be moving home, finally out of school and starting an art practice of my own. As my time in college comes to an end, I feel like maybe learning to fail with love has been the greatest lesson I have learned. So I started making bad paintings again, and some of them are maybe actually good paintings. But that’s not my business.

    Student

    paintings, feel, pandemic, practice, thesis, people, art, classes, life, dogs, year, college, nice, studio, thinking, gallery, weird, figure, personal, home
    “I call them ‘the bad paintings’. And it started when I took time off, in 2019 when I was just living in a little apartment in New York, and was just trying to figure out how to maintain a studio practice that felt personal and unrelated to being a school or sort of showing things."
    "I doubled with humanities last semester so I did my thesis last semester and I wrote my thesis about dogs. I wrote it about women artists and writers and their dogs and how that's like a sort of source of creativity and personal identity formation."
    “All the people that I came here with are gone. So it's just it's sort of like, even though I'm, you know, temporally the same age as a lot of people younger than me, but institutionally a different age. But it just feels so strange. I'm like, wow, like, everyone who I started at this place with is gone in a different stage of their life already. So it's like this weird sort of–I always say, that it feels like being a ghost. It's like, I'm already halfway on the other side. But also I'm still here and interacting with people.”
    "...the only real way that I could have some sort of like slowness in my life while also pursuing something that is inherently difficult and really unstable is to just move home."
    “How do I reclaim painting to be fun, and like something that feels relevant to my life? And fits in a way that's not stressful or performative.”
    Endnotes¹

    Anya Pertel
  • *
    •

    Artwork

  • 1
    •
  • 2
    •
  • 3
    •
  • 4
    •
  • 5
    •
  • 6
    •
    103 Bad Paintings
    Acrylic paint, gouache, and plastic gemstones on paper and unstretched canvas

    Statement This thesis project is not really a “thesis” project at all. These little paintings all come from a studio exercise that I began doing in the fall of 2019 and have picked up again this year, which I have lovingly termed the “bad paintings”—paintings made quickly and intuitively, without preciousness or fear. This practice came out of a place of deep ambivalence, of trying to renegotiate my relationship with art and school and budding adulthood. Fear of making bad art had made me nearly stop making art at all, so I had to remind myself that painting is fun. And that I love it. I had an art teacher tell me once that everyone is full of bad paintings, and the only way to make good paintings is to get all the bad paintings out of your system, so I decided to start the purging process. I was taking a semester off school when I began making my “bad paintings”—living in an apartment alone for the first time, working multiple jobs in a new city, making a bad painting everyday (somedays forcing myself to), stretching and re-stretching canvas over the same ten stretcher bars, slowly amassing a pile. The privacy of making paintings in a tiny room in a tiny apartment away from school showed me how to play, how to fail and how to fall in love with that failure. How to create an ethos of failure. I started making my “bad paintings” again after the pandemic and more time off, trying to figure out how to paint again in a world that I felt I didn’t know anymore. I still don’t know, and I learned that I probably never will but will just have to paint anyway. In a few months I’ll be moving home, finally out of school and starting an art practice of my own. As my time in college comes to an end, I feel like maybe learning to fail with love has been the greatest lesson I have learned. So I started making bad paintings again, and some of them are maybe actually good paintings. But that’s not my business.

    Student