Assignment 19 - Claire Thompson

Artist Teresita Fernandez, in a talk at a university, said, "Contrary to popular belief, moving to Bushwick, Brooklyn this summer does not make you an artist. If in order to this you have to share a space with five roommates and wait tables, you will probably not make much art." That has always stuck with me. In the talk, she gives 10 pieces of advice to aspiring artists, and starts the whole thing by giving that line above. I think that that sets the tone for the whole talk, and changed my view on being an artist all together. I read a transcript of those 10 pieces of advice while I was staying in Pittsburgh with my aunt, and I can't express enough how perfectly me reading that advice fell in line with my life at the time. The day I read that, I had visited the Andy Warhol Museum, a place that--and I mean this completely--fundamentally changed who I was as a person and how I viewed the future. Andy Warhol, as I learned at this museum, started out as kid from a poor family, and didn't go to art school. He only started getting his footing as an artist by doing drawings and paintings for advertisements. He got a reputation as being an incredibly hard working person, for when he was commissioned to do an advertisement, he would come back the next day with huge piles of work he did for the ad. And as he became more successful and self-sufficient, he also garnered quite a lot of celebrity. And the most important thing I think to remember about Warhol's story is that he started as a kid with no money in a steel town that certainly had no big art scene, but Warhol made one. I think that learning about Warhol's life, and how it coincided with hearing Teresita Fernandez's advice has impacted me in an incredible way. As long as I always have enough courage to be an artist, I want to remember that I don't have to be in NYC to do it; I just have to have the passion to do it.