Painter Reflects on Growth with Art Returning to Town
Megan Arné (Studio Art ’18) has left her mark in Provo — a mural on the Startup Building in downtown Provo. Although she’s taken up residency in Maine, some of her art is now being shown in Utah County again in a collective show of business cards at JKR Gallery.
Since graduating, Arné has completed graduate school at Boston University (BU) and become a mother to three children. As she has become a parent, she has closely intertwined painting with parenthood—the creative work with no end to hours or boundary to studio. Below, we learn about how BYU’s family values came to surface after leaving Provo and about her experience combining the professional and personal on canvas.
Q: What are themes to your current work? How would you say they are similar or different from your previous ones?
Arné: I would say that I am continuing to explore the same themes from my MFA thesis in my current work: caregiving, domestic labor, invisible labor, motherhood, maternal bodies and women’s health. It has been productive to be out in nature more living in Maine, outside of the city, but I would not say that nature is entering as a theme, more as an inspiration.
I am interested in adding shapes and forms from nature into a lexicon of shapes (the library of shapes that started with my son’s first 100 foods) and incorporating them into the patterns in my paintings. I am particularly interested in the forms I see in nature that relate to the female body, motherhood and growth/life cycle, like seeds, buds, flowers, etc.
Q: Did motherhood become a theme in your MFA program (as opposed to before)?
Arné: Yes, I never considered motherhood, caregiving or femininity as themes while I was doing my BFA at BYU — mostly because I was not a mother yet, but also because I was surrounded by other artists who were very similar to myself (women who put some degree of importance on faith and family). It was not until leaving BYU and entering a different academic space with peers and professors who were very different from myself that I considered the theme of motherhood to be something unique and important.
When I first started my graduate program I was focusing mostly on themes of general caregiving, empathy, family relationships and mental health in response to my experiences caring for my husband who has suffered from chronic pain for most of our marriage. “Night After Night” is one of the works from that time period on my website. It was not until my second semester at BU and I approached my maternity leave for my second child that I started working directly with motherhood as a theme.
Q: You've talked about how you use data and charts recording information from your life and motherhood in your work. Why did you decide to chart your caregiving?
Arné: Making records and lists has been something that I have done my whole life, and it really helped me keep my sanity and work through challenges as a new mother.
I have always worked, even at BYU, with a process of converting personal experiences into shapes and colors for paintings, so when I was considering making work about motherhood I began with a list of my son’s "100 First Foods." I created a shape for each food and assigned a color to each, then made them into prints and started incorporating them into patterns in my paintings. This library or lexicon of food shapes became symbols for other aspects of caregiving and the female body and maternal experience.
When my second son was born at the end of my first year of grad school, I transitioned into more rigorous documenting of my daily life that informed my paintings for the rest of my MFA. It was something that I would have done anyway, keeping track of sleep schedules and other data is the best way I know how to take care of myself and my kids in the early stages of a new baby. I was inspired by other mother-artists like Loie Hollowell, Louise Bourgeois, Ruth Asawa and Monique Prieto, and projects like Mary Kelly’s Post Partum Document and Lenka Clayton’s 63 Objects Taken From My Son’s Mouth to bring those record-keeping and maternal experiences directly into my painting.
Q: Can you tell me about your most recent work — the business card trees, for example?
Arné: The business card paintings are a mix of new symbols from my nature walks and old symbols I’ve used in previous paintings. Some of the new symbols are the fern leaves (trees), oak leaves and fig leaves. These are layered with patterns of caregiving symbols like the egg shape.
Q: In an interview in the Boston Globe you said, “I’m working constantly. When I’m at home with my kids I’m tracking their sleep, what they’re eating. I’m tracking my guilty thoughts, my emotions, making little charts. Then when I come to the studio, I’m still in the same mode.”
Do you feel like you are able to separate work and family life now that you have finished your degrees?
Arné: Yes, I am definitely not under the constant pressure of having to work and make art all the time now that I am done with school. It is more of a conscious choice of when to be in that mode of making, documenting and recording. I can turn it on and off when I feel the need. I don’t think my art practice and family life will ever be separated conceptually, but there is more mental and physical space in between them right now.
Q: Is there a part of the BYU experience that you feel helped prepare you for future studies and artistic success?
Arné: When I started my MFA at BU it was amazing to realize that the BYU Art Department is structured and run exactly like a graduate art program. At least it was very similar to my graduate program! I felt very prepared with everything that I experienced as a grad student. The fact that BYU provides private studios to its BFA students is an amazing privilege that is usually only for grad level students. Having a studio allowed me the space to experiment, make large work and develop a serious practice. It also was a perfect place to accept faculty and visiting artists for critiques and peer groups for group critiques, which are all a huge part of being a graduate student that I was happy to have already experienced. We were also expected to complete critical writing assignments about our work, including exhibition and grant applications, as well as an essay that was basically a mini-thesis paper at the end of the BFA. These prepared me to write my grad thesis. The BYU art program treats the BFA students like very serious artists.
Q: What advice would you give current students?
Arné: My advice to current art students is to
- Take advantage of all the amazing opportunities that the BYU Art Department provides. The school might not be located in NYC or LA, but the faculty do everything to give students exposure to the global art world.
- Attend every visiting artist lecture series that you can! I think I took that class nine times and learned so much seeing the variety of artists' work and practices who came to speak.
- Apply for all the grants that allow you to travel and do big projects outside the normal campus experience.
- Seek out relationships and advice from the professors, even after graduating. Their guidance was invaluable when it came to preparing and applying for graduate schools.
