Here is a blog post regarding Oklahoma, since we are on a roll with open space discussion.
After I graduated high school, I spent two months in a crummy motel in Los Angeles while taking summer illustration classes at this school called Otis. I had a funny formal drawing teacher there who was all about tension in teaching. If you did something wrong, he would (literally) start crying and screaming until the problem was fixed (he was gray haired--maybe in his 60s). He only cry-yelled at me once because the pear I was drawing kept falling off my desk--(it was probably just a bad pear drawing). He also stole one of my sketchbook images once and told me that he collaged it to one of his pieces at home. He brought back the slivers of paper that were discarded, put them in my shirt pocket and said "good boy".
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I was also in an illustration course at Otis with this hipster guy who went by the name "Bob Dob". He seemed like a swell enough guy, but I wasn't chomping at the bit to think of clever magazine pictures for his class.
So I said so much for that.
My last year of high school/time in California was exciting though. I was completely oblivious about a number of things---kind of like now, except it is no longer passable at this point. Anyway, I have been trying to get back to way I thought about images for a long time now.
After Otis I thought there was only one logical place to go...
OKLAHOMA STATE UNIVERSITY HONORS COLLEGE! OH BABY
So what was so great about Oklahoma? Well, I had somehow developed a certain fascination with being in the desert while I was in Catholic school. Oklahoma seemed like a close enough fit. I would compare the fascination to the manner in which Maria Abramovic described it during her Stamps talk. There was just some great big mystery to this notion that something life changing was waiting out there in a flat field of sand.
After a year of walking around the great plains I came back to Michigan a different person--so I guess it worked.
Once back in Michigan, I started working as an assistant to a former dean at the art school (back when Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw were around). He suggested I go to U of M for stronger academics and a serious art program (although he had heard it was a little different since he had left
-Evan M.
