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Tom Ferguson |
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navigate through the images by using "next" starting with: God's Placement
& Size Canston Panstover |
one began in the middle somewhere & worked its way out to the edges, not knowing ahead of time what was going to happen (Blue). In some I worked from drawings, just executing the pre- existing pattern but adapting it to the particular canvas. These paintings seemed to me very meditative, and elegant but also somewhat tedious to do, stretching my attention span. So I would alternate them with the collaborative (next category), paintings that generally were very fast & loosely painted, more fun, more my dominate temperament. In fact tempo was part of my interest at this time... painting at different speeds. 1975 and half of 1976 were at MSU. Then I spent 6 months at a farmhouse not far from Traverse City, painting in an old sauna and being rural. I became more and more infatuated with NYC, making trips there as frequently as I could during grad school and since, actually up to the mid-nineties. The art scene was incredible. I was getting alot of affirmation out of those trips and that scene. Peter Plagens, Jack Burnham and Joel shapiro lectured and Ellen Phalen, was a very interesting visiting artist. Jim Adley in the dept. was making monumental paintings & going unrecognized but his sensibility certainly influenced me. I lived in a coop, hung out for a time with a group of psychotherapist explorers, encountered real jazz, slipped into music dept. piano rooms nearly daily for an improv meditation. The campus was idylic, a river flowing through, the trees identified with tags... a very pleasant two years. The 6 months in the country was fine also. There I plotted my next move which came down to: move to Atlanta, make $4,000, move to NYC. Atlanta because some friends felt they had a very good chance of getting a contract to restore the Cyclorama. If they got it they promised to hire me. The south was warm, right? That had its allure. With $500 I headed south. Grabbed a job assisting in the delivery of newspapers, which allowed me to keep up with the Cyclorama developments. I also fell into teaching at Spelman College for a semester, filling in for an extra drawing class. |
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