Entering the studio, afternoon light pours through windows spanning two walls. Caroline Harrison hurries to the back corner of the room and emerges from behind easels and canvases with several damp watercolor paintings. An open window during the blizzard got them wet, but Caroline explains they aren’t too important — just landscapes and some portraits from the summer in Italy. She carefully lays them out on the floor to dry.
Making her way to the rear of the studio, Caroline passes paint-splattered chairs, a dilapidated couch and several large canvases — some on easels, most lined against the wall. A sign reading “Clean brushes = happy brushes” hangs over glass jars filled with paint-clotted brushes. “So I just have stuff everywhere,” Caroline says as she steps over the Italian landscapes. She shares the studio and points out each person’s area noting, “the mess is me.”
Caroline is a fine arts major concentrating in painting and graphic design. Like every senior in the department, she’s working on her required thesis. “The thesis for us is something more intangible than an academic thesis. We tend to evolve,” she explains. “The closest I can come to describing my thesis is dream states — things close enough to reality to be familiar, but creepy and uncanny.” The easel right next to us features a blonde woman almost entirely engulfed in darkness and seemingly gagged. Barbed wire wraps tightly around her bare breasts. It’s an image straight out of a horror movie. “This deals with the theatricality behind mental illness,” Caroline explains — a topic she’s studying in one of her classes as a Science, Technology and Society minor.
For most of us at Penn, serious reflection on what we study is rare, simply because there’s not much emphasis on evaluation beyond a letter grade. For example, how many people pick up final exams from their TA the next semester if they are happy with their grade for the course? Facts for an exam often go into our heads and out onto blue books, never to be recalled again. But in the Fine Arts department, whatever is percolating in your mind gets transformed into your own creation — in whatever form you want it to take. And because of this, serious evaluation of one’s work is always necessary. Professors and peers can offer suggestions and potential ways to progress with a piece, but ultimately, the student must decide for himself or herself how to improve it.
This opportunity for self-expression and reflection is to a small group of Penn students choose to focus on fine arts each year. With schools across the country devoted specifically to the arts, the decision to pursue this path at Penn may be puzzling to those who can’t see beyond their Blackboard sites and OCR interview rooms, but for this group of young artists, inside the studio at Charles Addams is exactly where they want to be.
Charles Addams sits on the corner of 36th and Walnut, marked by the familiar hand gate and silhouettes of the Addams Family trudging through a snowstorm (Addams, a Penn alum, is the family’s creator). The building used to be the faculty union, according to Caroline, and the old arts house was on Hill Field. In anticipation of a new arts building, the department had planned to completely renovate an existing gothic cathedral, to be paid for by Charles Addams’ widow. The cathedral was located where a parking lot currently stands on 34th and Chestnut. Yet after much of the restoration had been completed, a fire burned the entire building to the ground. The Fine Arts department had to look for a new location, and in 2001, it ultimately settled on the old faculty union on 36th and Walnut. The fine arts studios are located on the third floor, with photography dark rooms and a computer lab in the basement. Students’ pieces line the walls at every turn.
Surrounded by her paintings, Caroline describes the work she does in Addams as a lot of trial and error. “Part of the hard thing to do is reconciling ideas that you have with what you’re doing,” she says. Caroline sifts through a pile of pen and ink scenes reminiscent of the Twilight Zone: works inspired by her dreams. She points out that all but one of them features a person. “I tend to go back to that — drawing people. That makes sense for me.”
Allie Zuckerman, a sophomore concentrating in painting, also loves painting people, especially faces. “Ideally, I’d like to go to Pottruck and take close-ups of people’s faces,” she says. “There’s so much feeling in a face, and sometimes [photographed] portraits don’t convey it” because there are “more tones in painting than you’d get in photographs.” She has two paintings of faces in her studio: a large canvas of someone squinting in either frustration or anger, and one of a friend who she says was about to sneeze. Her iPhone background is her current work-in-progress, the portrait of her sneezing friend. She sets whatever she’s working on as her phone background so that even when she’s not in the studio she can think of ways to improve her art.
Allie is especially excited about the possibility of getting a model to paint during weekends. Even though she hadn’t specifically asked for one, her professor offered to make it happen after she mentioned that she’d like a model. “If the department doesn’t have something and you make a legitimate request, they’ll help you out,” she says, agreeing with other students that the Fine Arts faculty is an outstanding feature of the department. For her model, she specifically requested an older overweight woman for “the rolls, the color, the texture.” Her face lights up at the thought.
A painting she recently exhibited in the Addams Gallery, “Coppertone to Bloated,” featured a character similar to the requested model. During a vacation in Mexico she took a picture of an older overweight man walking on the beach. “He yelled at me,” she admits with a smile. “But it was such a great expression. I had just been waiting to paint it.”
As a sophomore, Allie is in Painting IV, the highest level in the painting class progression. The major in fine arts offers concentrations in sculpture, painting, video, animation, graphic design and photography. The Fine Arts major requires 16 courses. Majors are required to take Digital Design Foundations, Drawing I and II, 3D Design, Color Theory, three art or cinema history classes, six additional studio courses (five of which must be in one’s area of concentration) and two senior seminar and project classes to work on the thesis. This year’s thesis class has 16 seniors and one LPS student — eight are graphic design concentrations, a number Caroline notes as “abnormally large.” “I think graphic design is growing because people are realizing it’s a practical thing that could actually make money,” she muses.
For many students, the specter of graduation and the professional world outside of the cozy fine arts department looms large. Audrey Menco, another senior concentrating in graphic design, centered an entire project around the question, “What do you want to do with your life?” She sent out a text message asking that ubiquitous query of friends and acquaintances and then created a timeline of how long it took recipients to respond and what the responses were — answers ranged from the very specific to “huh?” Audrey began her foray into fine arts with drawing, but since no drawing concentration exists in Penn’s Fine Arts department, she had to choose between the two closest things: painting and graphic design. She describes graphic design as a funny concentration for a fine arts major since it’s more consumer – and client – based. The challenge, she says, is finding where graphic design will fit in a gallery context. “I figured [graphic design] would set me up better for the future,” she says, admitting that she “needed something more practical.” She regularly works with InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop — programs that are useful in a myriad of contexts other than fine arts. But she does miss working with her hands, an aspect of drawing that is lost in designing with computer programs. Originally pre-med, Audrey is now considering liberal art law or retail product development, citing the three art history classes all majors are required to take as helpful for either of the professions she is now considering.
Benjy Brooke, a fine arts major concentrating in animation, had somewhat of a different take when considering the practicality of his major. His interest in animation began in middle school, inspired by Wallace and Gromit and Cecille, a clay animated ball featured in several short segments on Sesame Street. But when he came to Penn, he was considering a degree in English or history. “I remember saying, ‘I gotta make a stand,’” he says of the night he made his decision to major in Fine Arts. “I would have been delaying the inevitable,” he says, if he pursued something else and rationalized that he’d come back to animation eventually. His last work was inspired by the so-called “miracle on the Hudson,” the remarkable water landing of US Airways Flight 1549 in which all occupants were safely rescued. The animation centers on a fictionalized version of the captain, Chelsey “Sully” Sullenberger. “What if he did it on purpose?” he asks with a mischievous look in his eyes. Benjy describes animation as “all about rhythm and planning... a sort of dance because of its timing.”
To create his short films, he scans individual pages into the computer. With about 10 frames per second that makes for hours of scanning, but he says listening to the radio helps pass the time.
In “Above the Bronx,” he recorded accompanying sound to the visual piece, which included an animated drawing of Sully Sullenberger ripping off his mustache and tossing it to the wind. However, in other short films he has done the opposite, creating animation to the timing of a pre-existing song.
Benjy considers animation a growing department. Although Pixar dominates the contemporary scene, there’s a “huge universe of art animation and computer animation,” he says. “Cartoons are the only things people see.” Part of the fun is “doing something people don’t see too much,” he said, referring to the the animations he creates using different mediums.
The pre-professional atmosphere at Penn may not always seem conducive to promoting liberal arts, much less fine arts, but undergraduate program director Julie Schneider affirms that “the [fine arts] program is pitched to the pre-professional,” recalling students who went on to law school, med school, education and art therapy. She lauds the usefulness of fine arts in “a culture so increasingly visual,” and has been working for a while now to offer fine arts classes as an optional fulfillment for one of the sector requirements all College undergraduates must take. Even though fine arts classes are not yet an option for sector requirements, the sentiment that everyone should do art, perhaps as a requirement itself, was common.
Allie described it as “meditative” and “good for everyone” because everyone is proud of things they create. “We have that part of the brain for a reason,” she added. “It helps you appreciate things more.”
Although the Fine Arts department may seem remote to someone who doesn’t choose to take classes in it, fine arts students are seamlessly enmeshed in the rest of the University academically. In fact, many fine arts majors preferred Penn over specialized art schools precisely for its integrated curriculum. Both Audrey and Allie cite the well-rounded education and excellent facilities that Penn’s Fine Arts department provides as reasons for choosing the school.
“Penn has so much to offer,” says Allie. “I have a whole studio, and some students at art schools don’t have that.” She, like other students, spends a considerable amount of time in the studio. She estimates a couple hours every day, between classes or whenever she has time. “Even if I don’t paint I’m thinking of ideas,” she says.
The time and work students put in undoubtedly draws them together because all attest to the tight-knit community, students spout accolades about other students and their projects. “We all get stoked off each other’s work,” says Caroline. “And all of us have studios [on the third floor of the Addams building]. If you’re pulling an all-nighter, chances are, someone else is too.”
Benjy also admits to spending much of his time at the studio, again, not necessarily working. “It’s like a clubhouse. Sometimes I read here,” he says, picking up The Catcher in the Rye from the coffee table in front of him. He suggests that maybe there should be an English requirement in the Fine Arts department since writing is also an art form in its own way. But really, the Fine Arts department overlaps with almost any other academic department at Penn. in its goal to make people think in new ways. As Benjy puts it, his art is an attempt to “pull something out of the audience’s brain that they didn’t know was there.”
