When I was a bit younger, I was blissfully and ignorantly enrolled in graduate school pursuing a fine art degree that I had always dreamed of earning.  I was honored to be accepted into an MFA program in the first place, because most days I felt like an art imposter not at all sure of what I was doing. I revered the amazing artwork of the students around me and I wanted to be an artist like them.  I knew I was less skilled than the others, but I was idealistic about my narrative content and showing potential with my artmaking abilities.  

My professors played their perfunctory roles by acting totally disinterested in my art, while I obediently slogged my way through their demanding three-year program complete with demeaning portfolio reviews at the end of each semester.  Most days, the faculty performed what I believed was painful torture of picking, poking and prodding me to go in directions I truly did not understand.  They were apathetic to my perceived naïve ideas and I was annoyed by their obvious academic elitism that disregarded everything I believed.  The angst and creativity were all rolled together into one big boiling pot at the perfect temperature for cooking up a somewhat battered yet hopefully passable graduate student.  

What I did not know at the time was every push and painful poke of those professors was supposed to make me more confident in my own ideas.  They were “helping” me find my voice by throwing every contradictory barb at me point blank.  I was confused, because I thought I had found my content already and I was not really interested in playing their torturous games.  I really wanted to be left alone to create my work and then at semester’s end go before them yet again and talk about art for a bit.  I am emotionally shallow in general and really don’t have a whole lot of onion layers to peel back, so their making me run around in the dark of contemporary art freak speak was not helpful and never really produced their desired effect… change.  

So, I continued along doing my art thing while my professors insisted upon continuing their torture thing.  In-spite-of our differences, I somehow made it through the arduous graduate program anyway.  Eventually, I left graduate school toting the same content I always intended to use and a hard-earned MFA degree with all the inherent battle scars.  I never deviated from my narrative, because no matter what the academic elite believed, it truly centered around what I believed and I had to remain true to myself. 

What I did gain from my three straight years of graduate school was a tremendous amount of artmaking skills from my daily work in the printmaking studio.  Toward the end, I was a pregnant mother creating art about such seemingly shallow issues as powerful women, becoming a mother and passageways into adulthood.  For some reason that was considered mundane and questionable and to this day, I will never know why.  It was my experience and what I wanted to make my art about. 

My art today still embraces the theme of powerful women and their roles in society that I started way back in my intaglio etchings in graduate school. I still love depicting the beautiful and timeless contemplative female often juxtaposed over random chaotic dark backgrounds.  Each woman is both powerful and peaceful, hard at work and prone to quiet in dark spaces that I created with deep browns and blues and blacks.  The contemplative female still intrigues me every day and I imagine I will continue studying her for the rest of my art career.  Oh, and old art professors, I have a message for you, my content is still just fine.