The following is a response paper that I wrote for my Photography class. The presentation I saw was given by the artist Kathy Moore at my University.
Note: Kathy Moore is probably an excellent artist who really knows her stuff. I’m pretty confident that if I compared the best drawing or sketch I’ve ever done to a finger painting that Kathy Moore made when she was 3, her fingerprinting would be several times better than my best effort. However, since (A:) I have no interest in paintings, and (B:) I was trying to be funny, the article comes off kinda harsh. So if you ever happen to read this Kathy, haha I was just kidding! Not really!
“Like any hard working and responsible student, I walked into the artist talk last Monday without doing any background research on the artist whatsoever. In fact, I didn’t even know what her name was; All I knew was that there was some sort of presentation thing starting at 4:00 and that I was supposed to be at it. It turns out that the artist’s name was Kathy Moore and she had won several awards and art shows with her work. One of the first things that I noticed about her photographs was that there weren’t any. Kathy was apparently a painter and was not involved in photography in any way. This was disappointing because I don’t know anything at all about painting. If she was showing off some photographs I would be able to talk to people around me and make statements like, “Notice how she used a low aperture to narrow the depth of field?” and “Her use of a contrast filter really brings out the color in that moose’s left nostril”. Instead I was reduced to asking those around me things like, “What does “Contay” mean? Is it a certain color of crayon?” Kathy paints and draws a variety of different ways. She does charcoal drawings, pencil sketches, abstract paintings, color still-lifes and self-portraits of herself with scary eyes. The subjects of many of her still-lifes seemed to be big piles of junk mostly consisting of 2×4’s or planks of wood. While these chaotic still-lifes were interesting at first, after what seemed like the 37th wooden-plank-filled scene it kind of became uninteresting.
Another issue I had with the presentation is that if you were not very educated in the painting or art show world, you might as well have been listening to some squirrels chatter. For example, most of the presentation sounded like this to me: “For this still life I combined blank and blank techniques along with blank strokes in a blanky manner. I like its blank style and how the blanks contribute to the blank. This piece won the blankest blank award at the National Blankity-blank Blank-Blankington Art Show.” All the “blanks” were words or terms that I had never heard of before. These words and terms were apparently vital for understanding what the heck she was talking about. Other than not knowing the terms, the only other thing I did not like about her presentation is the fact that she showed off some of her abstract paintings. For some reason a lot of people really like abstract paintings, but to me they just look like an extremely sick person sneezed on the canvas. Bragging about your abstract-painting-abilities is kind of like saying, “Well I might not be able to paint photorealistic pictures, but at least I can hold a can a paint and trip towards the canvas several times in a row!” Besides, the abstract paintings did not fit in with her other paintings at all so I feel that it would have been better if she had left them out.
In conclusion, the presentation made me feel out of place and confused. Most of her paintings and drawings were very nice but none of them really interested me, and not being able to understand half the things she said didn’t help. Seeing that she’s won several awards, a lot of people must really like her work. Oil painting and charcoal drawings are just too much for me, I’ll just stick to coloring books. Just as soon as I find the Contay-colored Crayon.”
Of Stuff and Stuff 
