Artistic passion unites students

Alessandra Sulpy will be graduating with a Masters degree from the Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts.

The extraordinary number of sleepless nights, her plans for the future and the story of her life at IU will be on display for her MFA 1 Thesis show until Saturday. It exhibits the thesis works of members of the Masters program.

“There’s a lot of me in this work,” Sulpy said. “It’s essentially that place where I would find myself happiest. It kind of answers that question ‘where would I be the happiest person in the world?’ You know, existing in this kind of imaginary space.”

Sulpy said she describes her show as “the final shindig,” but that doesn’t mean it all stops here.

“It’s actually kind of nice,” she said. “I feel like I can work a little bit more towards relaxed or something. I don’t have to feel like everything I do has to be shown.”
After finishing her degree, Sulpy hopes to go on to teach drawing full time, something she currently does in the School of Fine Arts.

Sulpy spends an hour sitting on the floor of the SoFA Gallery, cutting wallpaper that she painted herself, mindlessly handling a T-square and blade with precision. As she talks she continues to cut, occasionally stopping to re-adjust the paper on the cutting board or to pick a piece of what Sulpy refers to as “smoot” off her yellow and green circles.

Sulpy did her undergraduate work at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Md., and decided to come to IU largely under the influence of one of her favorite professors there.

“It had a good figure program,” she said. “One of my favorite professors at MICA went here 10 years ago or so. I really liked the way he painted, and he went here, so it had to be a pretty good place.”

Sitting with a SoFA shirt on, mismatched socks and paint-spattered jeans, Sulpy looks the part of the artist that she said comes so naturally to her.

“I come from a family of artists. My mom is a painter. My dad was an art school student,” she said, later adding, “It doesn’t seem at all peculiar, it seems natural more so ... Not that my parents were hippies. I don’t want to make them sound like that, but they have artist mentalities.”

Sulpy said she has adopted a bit of an artist’s lifestyle herself, from “eating, living and breathing” in her studio to adopting a sleep schedule akin to that of a vampire.
“I’ve cut a whole bunch of 15-hour days, 18-hour days,” she said.

As Sulpy works to set up her show, her boyfriend and assistant for the day. Sean Wallace, runs around the gallery doing whatever needs to be done.

“Do you want a drink?” he asks.
Yes, she says.
“Do you want something with caff–”
“Oh, caffeine for sure,” she says.
“It’s the first time I’ve ever had a solo show, so it’s a little bit nerve wracking,” Sulpy continues as Wallace goes to get the libations. “It’d probably be more nerve wracking if my nerves were awake enough to feel it.”

Although the shows the MFA students work so tirelessly on are not formally graded — most of that takes place in the fall semester — each painting student is required to write a thesis about themselves and their personal experiences with painting. This, Sulpy said, among other things, is unique to the painting MFA program.
Wallace, an outsider to the program, said that the program is not the only thing that is unique.

“There’s such a variety of students,” he said. “There’s so many people going in so many different directions,” adding that the one common thread that binds everyone is their dedication to their art.

However, MFA student Jacob Dudley, whose work is also on display through April 10, said this variety creates a good, although perhaps untraditional, chance to learn.

“Your mind can only think of so many things in a given amount of time ... But then I’ll go into somebody’s studio and they’ll be doing something completely different ... It’s cool cause it basically keeps you refreshed. Sometimes you get boxed-in in your own head too often,” Dudley said.

Although they frequently sequester themselves into their separate studios, the MFA students undoubtedly share some of the same struggles and, perhaps more importantly, passions.

“It just has to be something you’re interested in,” Sulpy said. “If you’re not living and breathing it beforehand and you can’t imagine yourself doing it, don’t even bother.”