Andrew Saylor
It was a Sunday night and Ava Murakami, a sophomore in University of Oregon’s Art and Design program, was still in the studio. As she pressed color after color onto the canvas, she watched the sun arc over the high windows in the painting classroom and descend behind the trees. It’s dark now, but she still has an hour or so to go before she feels like she can return home. The painting is much taller than her and depicts a jazz club in the midst of a lively performance. As the evening gets colder, she brushes warm rusts, maroons and vermilions into saxophones, shirt collars and ponytails. Though she doesn’t strive for realism, her distinct and precise style pulls viewers into the brief, hovering moment captured in the painting.
The jazz club scene has dominated Murakami’s headspace for weeks now. As gorgeous as it is, it’s also incredibly draining. She’s a bit more than halfway done and is already exhausted by it.
“I’m at the point right now in my painting where I’m looking at it and I’m like, ‘I don’t wanna look at this anymore.’ It just kinda pains me to see,” she said with a laugh. For her, this kind of creative burn-out happens almost every time she works on a piece.
Both the physical scale and depth of content that is expected from her in a minimal time frame leads to countless hours spent in the painting studio. When asked just how much time she spent there each week, she laughed again. The best estimate she could give was that she spends anywhere from one to four hours in the studio each day. She tries to average around two hours a day during the week. Oftentimes, it’s even more on the weekends. And this is on top of the six hours of class a week that is held in the very same studio. That’s about 24 studio hours a week on the low end.
“Last term during finals week I damn near slept in the studio,” Murakami said, “I was there ‘till sometimes like twelve in the morning.”
It’s safe to use the hyperbole that Murakami is always in the studio. It can be lonely, especially when the rest of her roommates are doing their homework wrapped up in blankets on the comfy couch in the living room. In her opinion, it’s easy to feel you’re missing out when you have so much alone time.
Murakami, as well as her classmates, often call family or friends while they work on their projects. Sometimes they coordinate their after-class studio hours so they can support and spend time with each other. Even so, the majority of Murakami’s time painting in the studio is spent by herself — just one student in a room with dozens of empty easels and chairs.
Her life as an art student is so much more than just painting — so much more than oils and canvas. It frustrates Murakami when people try to minimize the amount of work she puts into her art classes. To her, “there’s no way you could just boil it down to say, ‘just painting.’ There’s artist research, studies, art history, art analysis, presentations [and] formalist practices.”
There’s also intense pressure around building good skills; everything she learns and everything she does goes directly into the formation of her career. She doesn’t doodle in her classes, she practices the craft and the mindset that will shape the rest of her future. This is not something that comes easily to most people. “I don’t mean this in a rude way, but I don’t think a STEM major could come into my painting class and understand the goal,” Murakami points out, “It’s the way my brain works at this point.”
Sometimes all this hard work is rewarded with corresponding grades and support from her teachers. But this is not a guarantee. Every art teacher has a different style of grading and, often, it is at least partially subjective. Murakami’s current painting teacher is a harsh grader and not always complimentary of his students’ work. She describes her teacher’s grading metric in this way: “There’s no rubric. There’s no ‘thing’ that I can do that’s right — it’s just kinda like the general concept of the painting as a whole that’s either good or not good at all. And if it’s not good at all, we’re really made aware of that.”
Her first project in this class received a poor grade, and now she is even more anxious about how the jazz club piece will turn out. Though she acknowledges that every teacher evaluates projects in certain ways to help art students grow, it is still discouraging to earn a bad grade on something she invested so much time and effort into, and that is heavily marked with her creative fingerprint.
Effort isn’t the only thing Murakami must put into her art; she is also expected to provide a large portion of her own money. As an art student, she pays a materials fee for each art class she takes. However, the quantity of materials provided is not in accordance with the price of these fees. Murakami cites an instance this year when the university purchased gesso for her art class with their collective materials fee. Within a week, the students had used all the gesso and were informed that no more would be provided. Last year, when the oil paints she had been collecting for years were lost in the chaos of the studio, her bill for a small new set was around $200.
Together, these aspects contribute heavily to Murakami’s mental health. She noted that in high school, art consistently improved her mental health. Unfortunately, college is a different experience for her. She describes it as more “mixed.”
“It’s kind of hurtful almost, when art damages my mental health, ’cause that’s always something that I’ve used as a resource to cope with anxiety and such,” explains Murakami.
She still turns to art for comfort and inspiration when she’s struggling, but it’s difficult to use painting to de-stress when it’s the force causing that stress. The fact that Murakami no longer has time to make art outside of her classes does not improve this dynamic either.
Though she anxiously pushes to improve her craft, investing time, money and hard-earned inspiration, Murakami is still worried about her future with an art degree. “I feel uneasy all the time,” she admits, “Something that I’m thinking about daily — multiple times a day — is like, ‘Okay, how am I gonna make this work?’ This is really the only thing I can see myself doing.”
Murakami has other academic interests, but none of them compare to art’s encapsulation of everything she is and everything she wants to be. “In my head I’m coming up with all these other options in case this doesn’t work out for me,” explains Murakami, “And it doesn’t work out for so many people.” Many of her professors have art practices of their own, but almost all of them had to shift their visions to fit a stable career. Even for them, the path to a career in art was incredibly unpredictable.
Still, Murakami is grateful every day to be an art major. She feels that UO’s curriculum is especially rigorous and in-depth, paving her way for an accomplished career wherever she finds herself.
The strong Art and Design community is also important to her. Murakami noted that “there’s a really huge sense of community within the whole UO Design department because we all know each other, and because it’s smaller, and because we’re all working towards something we know is challenging.”
She hangs out with her classmates outside of class — finishing assignments, baking cookies and going out on the weekends — and is continually inspired by her hardworking professors. She has unique struggles, but she acknowledges that she also has the unique privilege of expressing herself fluidly and fully each time she’s in the studio doing her homework.
The moments she shares with her work and her peers shine through the challenges. And these moments are what it’s all about for Murakami; it’s what inspires her art. “It’s the casual moments that I’m interested in,” she says, “I don’t want to be painting people that are posed.”
The jazz club scene is just one of many casual moments that Murakami has turned into important explorations of human life, worthy of massive canvases and carefully placed oil paints. They are the heartbeat of her practice.
All the stress and anxiety is worth it to bring that to life: to allow a total stranger to feel the simple joy that is people living life. Murakami’s moments hang all around her apartment. A woman smokes a cigarette out of a fire escape in the kitchen, a figure is perched above a rolling sea in the living room, and a group of friends climb a cave in the hallway.
Her work as an art student is difficult in a way that other students will never experience. But she wouldn’t have it any other way. “It’s a form of play and fun and self-care as well as something I can see myself doing for a job,” she says. This winter Murakami applied for her Bachelor of Fine Arts. It will be hard work, but she’s ready. Soon there will be no more space on her apartment walls. They will be full of moments.