Critiques

Yves-Olivier Mandereau, Teaching Assistant

The day of my first critique, I was pretty scared. I was going into my drawing class, which wasn’t my strong suit at all. Up until then, I had made work mainly in clay and three-dimensional sculpture. So, the idea of putting up a drawing in front of the whole class to be, what I thought, just judged was terrifying. But it wasn’t a scary experience at all, and it’s not about judging the piece as an object, or about judging you as an artist. It’s an in depth exploration of what I did, and what I could have done better, and what not to do in the future.

Just with everything, as soon as you’re working on a drawing, for instance, you’re putting in so many hours, and hours, and hours into it, that you just get kind of used to it. Your eyes get adjusted to the drawing in the way that it looks, and soon after that, you can’t really see it for what it is. And it’s really amazing to have somebody else come in and look at it, and give you a fresh take, and with that fresh take, you see what you can do better.