The Mount Gretna School of Art logo has haunted me for 3 years. Last week I arrived in Mount Gretna Heights and witnessed the school in person for the first time, ending my 7-hour drive from Dayton, Ohio by stumbling out of my car and apologizing to my cottage leaders about what I thought was a copious amount of art supplies in the trunk. One week into the program and I’ve begun drawing plans in my head for how all the supplies I’ve accumulated since then are going to fit in my car on the way back.
When I transferred to a school with a painting program and decided on my major, I had no idea what was ahead of me. All I knew was that I liked to paint, and that the MGSoA logo in the hallway looked pretty interesting. I walked past a poster advertising the intensive program here nearly every day on my way to class and imagined what it would be like to take painting seriously enough to give up my summer. Often, I would stand in front of the hall bulletin board for stretches between classes, reading about all the different programs, and always I ended up staring into the picturesque photo of the woods around me now. Looking back, I’m not even sure I ever read any words on the poster. As I learned more about painting and spent more and more time at an easel I thought harder about applying. Last year, my professor Glen Cebulash began asking me how serious I was about painting. He suggested looking into a summer program to test my resolve as a painter and figure out what I really wanted to do. I suspect he was tired of listening to me waver back and forth about graduate school and lament about how I “don’t have time” to paint outside of class.
Luckily, there is no such thing as “no time to paint” in Mount Gretna. We paint every morning, and every chance we get after that. When I was younger, I used to ask artists how they got something to look so good and the answer was always “I do it every day”. Those artists' voices are rattling around in my head as I witness myself and 20+ other students improving by the hour, never letting a brush grow cold. Even last night during my 10:00 pm trip to the classroom two students had been there for hours prior, painting away.
During our studio visits in NYC this past weekend the voices got even stronger, meeting serious painters and being in their space, witnessing their success and their process, there is one throughline, and that is that they do this every day. When they aren’t painting, they’re looking, or they’re reading about looking, or talking about looking. In conversation with my housemates, we reflect on our first week in Mount Gretna and recount how it feels much longer than seven days—that we could have been painting here for months already and are looking forward to many more. In another conversation with the same group, we all panic a little about the midterm requirements for paintings from outside of class and for a moment I forget we’re already doing it. We’re just as serious as the rest of them, those artists who do this every day, we’re doing it too. I am a little less haunted by that green and gold logo now that it takes up the whole of my vision instead of a little corner in the back of my mind, following me wherever I went. As my peer Anumi Wickramasinghe aptly put it the other night, in our newfound obsession with looking and dragging each other around the neighborhood to go “wouldn’t that be a great painting?”, it’s possible I have gone from haunted by Mount Gretna’s brilliant green to seduced. I now stand and stare into those picturesque woods every day, looking more than I ever have before.