More than two years ago, as Greta Myers (website, Instagram) was finishing her MFA at the University of Missouri, I decided to include her in my Becoming the Student series. I’ve included a number of my grads before, but always because I felt some strong kinship with what they were making. With Greta it was a little different.

Greta is a strange, compelling person, and she has a bearing of nonchalant opposition. She’s got a strong personality – exhibiting many unique facets and diverse motivations – that’s so different from mine. In spite of this I think we were able to have an understanding while she was in grad school. As a part of her graduate thesis committee, I was always evaluating the work she made and trying to engage with it critically and as an advocate for it. As an artist and teacher, I’m consistently interested by work that throws me off balance or forces me to think outside of my categories. Greta always did this. I was forever being turned off by some aspect of the work, yet invariably interested in her approach and attitude.

Anyway, I began work on a portrait of her in April of 2014. I worked on the piece infrequently, eventually thinking it was done in August of 2015. Around this time I began to be seriously involved in a non-representational body of work and so left off with all of my in-the-works Becoming the Student pieces. A month ago I decided to get back to Greta’s piece in earnest and, after painting the entire piece over again, it’s finally complete… though it no longer accurately represents Greta’s arms and hands; she’s added a few more tattoos in the interim. Click below to see it large – the file is 9.25 by 30 inches.

STAY GOLD (Greta Myers), oil on canvas on panel, 13 by 42 inches, 2014-2016.

 And now, here are a few of the thoughts Greta had when I interviewed her:

On Grad School

“It’s been the hardest three years for me in a while – in terms of stress level it’s like getting divorced or having a parent die – but it was good. I feel like I made the program enough of my own and make it work for me. I did it the only way I knew how. I definitely don’t think it was a mistake. If I had quit after undergrad I would probably just be sitting in some stupid busy work job and have never learned the work that it takes the be an active, practicing artist.”

On Being an Artist

“If you’re really an artist, I think you have to be an artist. You don’t have the choice to not be one, and those people who don’t follow that path become miserable and they just don’t function to their full potential.”

On Leaving the Academic Setting

“I’m a little worried about getting along with others. Outside of academic art, life is very different; it’s a completely different world. And I’ve been in school for the last seven years. I’m a little worried about getting along with others, like, just communicating. I mean, you go into a group setting with people who are artists or aren’t in academia and it’s like, what do you talk about? So just getting back into real life is going to be an adjustment. Learning how to build a community – not family, not friends – who get what you’re doing and who share the same passion, that’s important. You have to build it. It doesn’t just happen.

(Interview Date: April 30, 2014)

Detail of STAY GOLD (Greta Myers), oil on canvas on panel, 13 by 42 inches, 2014-2016.