The Preoccupation Behind Creation: How the Muse Molds the Artist-Student

All your life, people have praised your drawing, your painting, your ability to sculpt or assemble forms. But you know that what you’ve turned out so far is just OK--competent stuff but nothing like the tough, deep, personal work you someday hope to create.

How do you come to terms with who you are and what you care about? And how do you squeeze all that down into specific works of art?

Graduate students in studio art inevitably begin to grapple with these questions. Those enrolled in the two-year program at UC Irvine are offered an unusually large amount of unstructured, unsupervised time to improve, to experiment, to find new directions.

During the late 1960s and early ‘70s, the Golden Age of UCI’s art department, it was famous for the exchange of highly idiosyncratic ideas between students and well-known faculty, a conceptual orientation and a deliberate lack of emphasis on technique and craft.

Today, the school’s atmosphere is more low key and--though Tony DeLap and John Paul Jones remain--much of the superstar faculty has departed. The diverse current crop of 16 graduate students includes recent graduates and women who have raised families; artists from across the country and across the world; painters, sculptors, photographers, a ceramic sculptor and a performance artist.

None is particularly interested in rigorous, conceptually based art. Still, as they are serious artists-in-development, the big questions remain.

Of all the grads, the five who speak below said the most about the way they work and the preoccupations behind their art. Next week, more of the student artists talk about the UCI experience and what comes next, when they re-enter the “real” world.

Joseph Crosetto is quiet and a trifle shy, the kind of person who looks as if he’s happier working with things than talking with people.

He has been working for months in the outdoor sculpture area, on a welded steel piece that looks puzzling until he assembles it and sets it upright. Then, it becomes a paunchy, life-size silhouette of a man with a squinting eye.

“It’s an old machinist,” Crosetto says, “a friend of mine, and life has been kind of rough on him the last couple of years. His wife divorced him and his kid died in a plane crash and he . . . had to get a new job. He’s 60 years old, and it’s like he’s starting all over again.

“He’s a great guy, real clever, like an inventor. A jack-of-all-trades. He could take that radial arm saw apart and rewire it and explain to you why you use this kind of wire and not that kind.

“For the front, I wanted to get this shell. . . . But he’s still a real strong person. (On the reverse side) it’s gonna have maybe something like a landscape painted in it. . . . This is his spirit.

“I use a portrait because it gives me a point of reference to fix on. You know, you’re gonna be working on a piece for six months. If you’re just working with an abstract idea, the idea kinda drifts along, and when you get done with it, it may look good enough, but the idea is so muddled because it went through so many stages.”

Crosetto says he was initially influenced by pop music: “The sincerity of what they were doing--if you could move people like these people moved me, that seemed like such a great thing to be able to do.”

He felt he lacked musical talent, but “as soon as I put my hands on clay or sculptural material, things came naturally to me.”

Before he started his current piece, he didn’t know how to weld, so he taught himself. “Welded steel is a real bear a lot of the time, fitting all those stinkin’ little pieces together,” he says.

After he graduates, Crosetto has few illusions about making his way as an artist. “It’s like being a professional baseball player. You could have some illusion that you’re gonna practice real hard and become a professional baseball player, but it’s probably not a good thing to bank your future on.”

“I started making visual things when I was real young,” says Steven Riddler, a ceramicist with a self-deprecating humor whose conversation often takes a moody, self-analytical turn.

“I used to go to a program at Syracuse University with my mother,” he says. “I’d take art classes, and she’d take psychology classes on what images children make.

“By my sophomore year (at Alfred University in upstate New York), I knew I was going to major in ceramics. . . . Like a lot of ceramicists, I was seduced by the material more than anything.”

For his end-of-the-term exhibition, Riddler has embarked on an ambitious project: stylized, mold-formed ceramic heads of 48 men and two women who have died of acquired immune deficiency syndrome. The idea and the images came from an article published in Vanity Fair magazine last year.

“The article really hit me, and so did the pictures. The way the pictures were cropped is the way I cropped the heads. They’re very stylized. I wanted to make them fast and get it over with; I don’t know if that’s covering up for my inadequacy. They almost all look the same, all small but all individuals joined by fate or by circumstance.

“I just wanted to give some names to numbers. . . . I hope I’m not going to take advantage of their dying. I wanted to give them a presence.

“I’ve only been working with the figure for the last few years, and I’m constantly learning. I use my own body a lot. In mirrors, I get into poses and see where the pushes and pulls are.”

Riddler derived the poses for his satirical “Cocktail Party Series” by looking at the photographs in Newport 714 magazine. “I always like those little pictures where everyone looks so photogenic,” he says, scrutinizing his array of brightly painted social climbers.

“I sometimes think my work is too obvious,” he says, shifting his gaze into space. “It might be nicer if there was more mystery in it.”

“I’ve been fighting over big-versus-small for a long time,” says Marlon Dee Meyer, a thoughtful, outspoken painter who sometimes, in the garage-turned-studio of her mother’s Playa del Rey house, pulls down the blinds to block out the brilliant oceanside sun.

“I always ask everyone, ‘Is a small piece equal to a big piece?’ I still haven’t decided. It’s like this personal conflict. So that’s why I work real, real tiny, and the next week real big.

“Actually, I think my work begs to be bigger. I think that’s the way it’ll end up--60 by 65. I think it likes to be that size.”

This past year, Meyer has also been switching back and forth from drawings to painting, achieving in both a dense and brilliantly hued clustering of forms that can bring to mind Max Beckmann, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

“In the drawings, I get forms and symbols and develop some new imagery that I don’t do in the paintings, because painting is so seductive, and you can get wrapped up in the color and mark-making and brush work.

“Something that I’m going to work through in graduate school is to decide what’s the important thing and what should be edited. I think that’s important for everyone. I have a real problem with it because I just want to put everything in.”

Meyer likes to pin her densely abstract paintings and drawings on the walls of her studio to analyze any recurrent themes.

“I thought for a while that I would get swept away with content, but I decided that that’s not what I want to do. I’m interested more in form and shape and the beauty of a piece.

“I think you always go back to the way you first drew. Anything you learn in school you just have to throw away, because some of it can just clog you up. What you really need to do is just express who you are.

“I have one gal who’s bought a lot of my works since I was an undergraduate. The ones she favors are the darker ones. Sometimes I feel swayed to do more of those, but I never really do because I just don’t have it in me to do that.”

“I had a kind of desire to make them three-dimensional, more than just a two-dimensional surface,” says Alex Rudinsky of his landscape paintings, some of which incorporate various objects--a fan, a screen, a light.

“The found objects helped me do that. For instance, this one started out with a field I painted on location. Then I wanted to put bedroom curtains around it--almost as if it were a child’s room looking out into the world.

“And then I went running around, looking for various materials that were sheer enough to be transparent and yet reflective enough to create some of the ambiance of the billowing curtains, much like in an Andrew Wyeth or something.”

Andrew Wyeth? Is Rudinsky really getting inspiration from an artist that most hip art students regard as little more than a joke?

“I don’t have a strong affinity” for Wyeth, answers the painter, whose clean-cut appearance and personable, friendly manner give him the air of a yachtsman or a youthful banker on vacation. “He does windows and a lot of his art is within that tradition of the image as window. I think I’m working on these paintings with . . . the one-point perspective and deep space kind of thing, much like (contemporary German painter Anselm) Kiefer, who would probably be more acceptable in terms of art students.

“Wyeth came to mind just because of his curtains. They have this lovely feeling.

“I painted this thing at first just as this big landscape. You know, that’s worse than Wyeth. I mean, when you go into stores, you know, the art that’s right next to the hardware--those are sunsets or they’re wave paintings or something. They’re taboo in the sense that they don’t even fit into any kind of aesthetic tradition. In terms of 20th-Century painting, not too many people devote themselves to painting sunsets. But I was struck by the sunsets around here--you know, the air quality and so on--and so I painted these.

“I just want to do it.”

Photographer Troy Cherney talks softly and slowly, letting his phrases drift off into long pauses. He’s seated in his cubicle-like studio, one of a cluster of work spaces set aside for UCI grad students in a Santa Ana industrial park.

One of his pieces consists of a series of black-and-white photographs of crumpled socks with words superimposed, one to a photo: “Just don’t leave any marks, baby.”

“I like words with images when it works,” he says. “Things in life leave marks on people all the time. You’re either making your mark or someone’s making a mark on you--religion, if you’re brought up real religious, or your parents or certain relationships change the way you think of things. . . . (The piece) is pretty much about control, whether it’s self-imposed or imposed by experience.”

When he showed it to a fellow student, though, she “reacted real negatively to the word ‘baby.’ She could talk calmly about it, but it really offended her. I enjoyed that because we talked for 20 minutes.”

Later he decided to move the last photo to the floor, where viewers would look down on it and be more likely to understand that he also finds the word offensive.

Another piece contains small photographs of dead animals he has found on roads.

“I was going to work and there was a possum (on the road), just like a landmark. I don’t think anybody ever picked it up. . . . Most people don’t notice things dead on the road. You’ll see something in the road, and people will just keep running it over for months. (The possum) just eventually became nothing. It took me a while before I noticed it, and it just amazed me that something that was alive that died could become that unnoticed. People are that selective about what life to respect.

“I’ve shown (the piece) to people, and it’ll stick with them. People will tell me they saw a dead possum and thought of me.”

Work by the UCI grad students is being shown in an ongoing series of weekly exhibits at the Fine Arts Gallery on campus through June 4. The gallery is open every day but Monday from noon to 5 p.m. Admission is free. Information: (714) 856-6610.