{"id":41,"date":"2012-03-20T14:40:11","date_gmt":"2012-03-20T18:40:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cfa-magazine\/?p=41"},"modified":"2014-07-30T10:52:41","modified_gmt":"2014-07-30T14:52:41","slug":"open-studio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cfa-magazine\/2012\/03\/20\/open-studio\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Studio"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Corinne Steinbrenner; Photos by Kalman Zabarsky<\/h4>\n

Marc Schepens, a second-year student in the graduate painting program, makes large-scale paintings based on small shards of the past. Schepens grew up visiting his grandparents in Nahant, a community on a peninsula north of Boston, where he combed the beach for fragments of blue and white 18th-\u00adcentury Canton china that often wash up on shore there\u2014remnants of shipwrecks from the colonial-era sea trade. Schepens now lives in Nahant himself and continues to collect the porcelain shards, which inspire his current work. He recently offered Esprit<\/em> a tour of his painting studio.<\/p>\n

\"Open

In all graduate programs, you\u2019re afforded some sort of studio space, but the spaces here are generous in size. The studios really encourage us to be here as much as possible and to generate as much work as possible.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"In

In terms of painting surfaces, I\u2019ve been using pages from books and medical journals\u2014things we found in my grandparents\u2019 attic after they passed away. These pages show images from the Wawel Cathedral in Poland, which I picked because I grew up Catholic, so there\u2019s always a Catholic influence somewhere in the background inside of me.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"There\u2019s

There\u2019s a little red up here in the corner. The painting started out mostly blue, but the color of my geraniums started to work its way onto the canvas.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"I\u2019m

I\u2019m starting with something that is a very small piece of what was once a complete pattern, and then I\u2019m amplifying it into a larger scale. Sometimes the images feel like things that are concrete and recognizable\u2014like landscape or ocean. Other times they feel simply like gesture.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"I\u2019ve

I\u2019ve taken two contemporary art history courses with Greg Williams, and those classes have been invaluable. Art historians love to categorize periods\u2014modernism, then postmodernism. It seems the term art historians are using to describe the world we\u2019re in now is globalization. When I began working on paintings derived from these shards of china, I was struck that although we talk about globalization in terms of today and now, these shards are emblematic of globalization and cross-cultural exchange that have been going on for a long time.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"When

When we did the studio lottery for this year, I specifically wanted to be on Commonwealth Avenue because I\u2019d have the north-facing light, which is the best light during the day. I tend to work during the day because I have kids and try to get home in the evenings to be with them.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Corinne Steinbrenner; Photos by Kalman Zabarsky Marc Schepens, a second-year student in the graduate painting program, makes large-scale paintings based on small shards of the past. Schepens grew up visiting his grandparents in Nahant, a community on a peninsula north of Boston, where he combed the beach for fragments of blue and white 18th-\u00adcentury […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6143,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9,3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cfa-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cfa-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cfa-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cfa-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6143"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cfa-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cfa-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":532,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cfa-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions\/532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cfa-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cfa-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cfa-magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}