From Application to Porfolio

As the first post on this blog, I will be placing work done during my two years in the MFAIA program.  I hope to take visitors from the application process through the portfolio product (yes, there is a product).

My work as a landscape designer
northstarstoneworks.com

This will also be a repository of the work and projects I have done that were ancillary to the degree
work.  Short philosophical statements or reflections will accompany highly visual posts and a few illustrations will be placed in highly literary posts.
The photos here are a few that I included in my application.

I welcome comments and questions.
David Neufeld March 24, 2015

Personal Statement

David Neufeld: Born 1952, Brooklyn, New York to leftist parents.

I was never meant to live in a city.  I was the kid who found crickets in the concrete schoolyard of P.S. 238 while balls whizzed past me.

The Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and Brighton Beach became my natural and artistic refuges.  My parents encouraged my artistic talent and my love of nature with all opportunities at hand.

We moved to Newtown, Connecticut in 1962 and I became a country boy.  The influence of the five hundred acre farm across the road, it’s ‘Grant Wood’ matriarch, her countless progeny, and freedom to roam the farm, woods, and fields suffuse my work to this day.

On the cusp of preparing for pre-med school in my junior year in high school, I rediscovered my love of the visual arts and began painting watercolors and oils while hiking or walking in the Appalachian Mountains of Rockland County, New York.

The Vietnam War, Black Power, and the killings at Kent State roiled my peers in different ways.  In 1967 I became an Eagle Scout. In 1969, I was arrested at my draft board sit-in.   At eighteen, I registered as a Conscientious Objector.

While at Goddard, professors David Novak and Ted Scuris engaged my deeper perceptions of visual arts.  I was prolific, producing dozens of works each week.  I explored both the historic and far-flung beauty of the campus.

Cistern wall, Joshua Tree National Park

 *Throughout my adult life—that would be forty-two years since high school—I have made my living as an artist.  My resume tracks that path.  The layering of my artistic explorations, which includes mastering skills in painting, pottery, storytelling, writing, stone work, and landscape design, has allowed me to support myself, my family, and most importantly, it has given me the freedom to synthesize a ‘unified field theory’ of sorts, that ties all of those disciplines together.

I view each project simultaneously through multiple lenses: landscape design can be seen through story narrative, storytelling through visual arts, photography through the perspective of classical fiction, to give just a few examples.

I wish to base my MFAIA plan on my keen awareness of the commonalities among disciplines.  I

The house I designed and hand-built in Maine

have always enjoyed speaking and teaching.*  An MFA offers an opportunity to direct my work and experience toward the teaching of others.  I feel that teaching and the articulation of my approach is the next important phase in my life.  I feel that this returns the pursuit of art to a classical foundation, in which artists work freely with a vision of universal dynamics.