Art Origio

A Reflection on Maya Clark’s Interview and the Development of Her Artistic Voice

Spending the afternoon with Maya, I discovered many things about her as an artist and as a log-rolling instructor. It was a Friday afternoon, and the trees were finally fading from green to orange. The sights of autumn did not match the temperature—it was a humid, almost sweaty day. We strolled from the business school to our final destination, the art school. As we walked, I asked her the usual questions: Why do you paint? What do you paint? And so on.

Prior to our conversation, I never really knew her as an artist, but rather as a classmate. I had always seen Instagram posts of her artwork and looked at them in awe. The extreme realism was transportive. Learning about her career as an artist, I discovered that, unlike your typical modern subversion artist aiming to make a statement, Maya paints simply because she enjoys the process. To her, the message of an artwork is highly subjective. It depends on who you are, what you want to see, and what you know. In totality, the message is always up in the air. But the paint, the canvas, the subject—those are objective. And so, Maya paints to paint.

Walking into the Sam Fox Art School, a place I had never been, I was both shocked and excited. Hanging on the walls, from the ceiling, and lying on the floor was student artwork. Wood, spray paint, string, and canvases were everywhere. “These students are really talented,” I thought, trying to conceal my jealousy (I wish I could paint). Maya led me into her artistic space. Every student gets a box, which they share with another artist. The small box was neat, furnished with a table in the middle, and her current artistic creation displayed on an easel to the left. Maya was working on abstraction, straying away from her typical realm of extreme realism. Of course, it was an assignment for class, and the teacher wanted her to step out of her comfort zone.

“Woah, I like this a lot. Are those chains?” I asked.

“Well, I guess they could be. Now they are chains,” she replied, the wheels turning in her brain. Abstract art at its core.

The last stop on our walk was her dorm. Living on the first floor of Village East offered many luxuries, one being tall 10-foot ceilings. The ceilings were the perfect place for Maya’s completed works. Almost every available surface was decorated with Maya’s art; it was some sort of dorm gallery. There were pieces depicting her roommates and, most excitingly, pieces that exhibited glass, aluminum, water, and reflections.I noticed this trend: these were extremely hard subjects to paint, yet here Maya was, including them in almost every piece. It all rooted back to her love for art. She wanted to push her skills, so she sought out challenging subjects to paint. It was a personal challenge. As an onlooker, I was deeply impressed by her talent and her self-motivation to improve her craft.

Each piece adhered to a process Maya had developed over years of painting. The subjects were always real people, more often than not people she was close with. The scenarios—two people in the shower or someone wrapped in plastic wrap—were also real. The combination of real subjects and extreme realism made Maya something of a photographer, capturing moments despite manipulating the final image for aesthetic purposes.

One painting, in particular, stoke with me. It was a large 6-foot by 4-foot oil on canvas of a man in a suit, grasping a Bible, and suffocated by plastic wrap. Completing the piece required many moving parts. She needed a few things: a Bible, a man in a suit willing to be wrapped in plastic wrap and remain still, and time. The process, however, is the most exciting part. Maya, a Venezuelan-born artist living in Boston, focuses on art as the act of creation. What you take away from it is entirely up to you—and that is the beauty of it.