FAMILY PORTRAITS
When I was a young art student at Rhode Island School of
Design we had drawing, design, and painting classes that lasted for many hours
accompanied by seemingly endless critiques. We learned our craft with rigor and
we learned how to think and talk about art. At that time Pop Art was taking over
the art world so as we continued to paint traditional still lives, they became
populated increasingly by American flags and Mickey Mouse toys. Then there was
Op Art and one “ism” after another. I did not join any of these movements
but continued to learn how to draw. For young artists at that time the most
intimidating thing was the blank canvas and the question ‘what to paint”.
I have made art about my life. Now, many years later, I see that not joining a movement and not making work for commercial galleries was a conscious choice made again and again. My art is not political and it is not made to be a commodity.
When I left RISD,
and after getting married a few years later, we moved to
Twenty five years later when I was teaching at the Harvard
University Graduate School of Design I went back to RISD to complete my
bachelor’s degree. I found that the dominant ideology in university art
departments was, at that time, Marxist Feminism, even though the Berlin Wall was
about to come down. I was told by a New York critic-professor that I should not
make any more art because I was a white male. This statement seems
more absurd to me now when I look at this drawing of my daughter Rachel that I
made when she was five years old. 
I endured the theory classes, the bad performances, and the
bad political art. My BFA Show was a large gallery room full of hundreds of
works of art of my children, not something that a New York Gallery could sell,
not political, but which my fellow students loved. They said things about it being art
that is very different, and refreshing, and art that is indeed about life.
Christian Paul
Mary Cecilia
