To prepare for his second semester as a painting major, junior Silas Maddox felt he needed to “take the pressure off” and simply enjoy what he loves to do. The painting studios at Wash U often produce high-strung students who get so caught up attempting to master the conceptual form that they start to lose their grip on reality. Maddox, however, differentiates himself by not taking things too seriously.
“I’m really just going with the ow, you know?” he said while giving a tour of his workspace to confused pre-froshes. “I mean, just look at that flow. See how the blue just surrenders itself to the orange as my brush caresses the canvas? That’s the kind of process that can’t be duplicated. Am I right?!”
“I used to be like all the elitist theorists around here, searching for some kind of universal system of truth in the avante-garde within their materials,” he added. “Isn’t that the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard? I’ve totally turned around and gone all post-postmodernist since then. It’s just my super chilled out way of uncovering the true meaning of life and human existence and shit. Sort of a small gift to the world. That’s just how Silas P. Maddox gets it done.”
“Whoops, made a bad mark there, see? It’s no biggie! I can just throw it out and start again when- ever I want to, no problem whatso- ever,” he added while asking us to step back in order to avoid inter- rupting the wavelengths in his creative airspace.
Despite Maddox’s outlook, sources within the art school admit that the student has struggled to perform at the level expected of him. “Silas has yet to master the craft,” explained art professor Emilia Jones- Murray. “His pseudo intellectual approach falls well short of the brilliance of, say, my courageous painting of a man’s head on an owl’s body superimposed over a series of cubes that challenges the status-quo and disrupts the boundaries of time and space itself. No, Silas’s work teeters dangerously close to the mundane. That’s why he got a C+.”
Nevertheless, Maddox refuses to be deterred by his poor grades.
“Whatever man, I’m just rolling with it.” he explained. “Monet’s paintings were unappreciated during his life- time too. Someday, maybe after my death, my art will be hanging up in the Louvre. And I’ll be there to see it, because my soul is immortal and transcendent, and wherever there is art, there is Silas P. Maddox. But yeah – if not, that’s cool too.”