art students -- describe some of your peers' lamest artworks

There are a few types of bad art. Sure there are artist that just lack the skill to create good work; I had a woman in one of my illustration classes who for her last year repainted old book covers with the intent of creating a better cover than the original. Boy oh boy was she waaaaay off. Then there is the guy who was sheltered all of his life who in college sees Queen of the Damned and thinks he is a vampire until Pirates of the Caribbean comes out and he starts dressing as something much worse, and for 3 years has to include a pirate in every piece he does.

So yes, those are the bad artist, but the worse kind is the copout kind, the kind that appears to have put no effort and little thought fourth. During my freshman Drawing 2 class our final assignment was to draw a piece that depicts a persons true self. This guy comes in for the critique and hangs a mirror on the wall next to all of the other pencil and pen drawings… and the class ate it up. The guy went out and bought a mirror, big *beep* deal. It’s a drawing class!

Then my junior year I took a fine arts class outside of my major (illustration). That was weird. It’s like going from an almost business setting where you need to be in class on time, to some hippy town where no one else ever showed up, even during critiques, and when people were at the critiques the only thing they could say was “I like that” and then walk out of the room. No joke.

This guy named Travis would do (poorly done) silhouettes of horses and write the word “whores” next to their thighs.

The work that angered me the most was a show hung in the gallery. This girl named Penny, who I later began to despise as a person because she liked to pretend to be very sympathetic to everyone’s feelings when she was quite far from it, sent letters to Bush slamming the war. It isn’t the politics of it that I didn’t like, it’s the fact that there were maybe 70 or so of these 8x10 letters that were hung side by side, so not only where they there, but they took up the entire wall space, space that was supposed to be reserved for my departments work. Even worse, after about 15 letters she started to repeat herself.

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Our "Class Kiss-ass/douchebag" painted the ever so trendy 'Statue of Liberty with a tear.' Lame and predictable.

I did this summer precollege course this summer at a prestigious art school and there was this one girl who continously did, well bad work.

She tried wayyyyy to hard to have scandalous work but it was obvious she didnt really care about the topics she was portraying and on top of that she couldnt draw/paint for *beep* Her final project was a huge mural in a work room that was something about 'a womans right to choose' showing the open legs of woman with blood coming out and scribbled quotes surroudning it. It looked like a corrupted third grader decided to scribble over the walls. It was just bad. And lots of people ate it up. Oh well. At least she was passionate about it.

THANK YOU all for this! You absolutely made my day.

I feel like every response I read could have happened in any class, and over the years as an Art Education major I've collected some good stories as well (or awful stories I suppose).

One of the funniest moments was my freshman year in Drawing One's figure drawing exercise. We were all new and nervous about it except for one girl, the one with pink hair and anime clothes and the TAIL attached to her jeans, who hardly refered to the model. When our model was circulating the room he stopped dead in his tracks when he saw that she'd drawn him as an anime character with a sword in his hand. I laughed about it for weeks.

Another notable experience was during a Jewelry crit. There was this girl that only liked frogs, fairies, and Japanese symbols. Her work was complete s*it, but we were usually pretty kind to her during critiques. Our teacher was the one that finally snapped when she was trying to explain the meaning behind a Japanese symbol with some sort of anime referenced piece... He told here that she was "Raping an entire culture". I about died.


Oh yes, and there is the guy that is currently raising hens and pigs on some sort of commune for his PAINTING class, and the extremely conceptual teacher is eating it allll up. Oh art.

this is one of the best threads i've ever read. please keep the stories coming. i must live vicariously through your art school experiences.

and i dont get the anime/manga obsession thing either. i know one too many of those types going to pratt and sva.

Haha. great stories, great stories.

A friend of mine used cheap coloured pencils to draw spoons and forks raping each other all over these Escher-esque stairs, with flying cigarrettes in the background, and rollerblading bongs on a ripped piece of cardboard. The idea sounds kinda cool, but it was crudely executed. The drawing was really pale, and difficult to see, and it took you ten minutes to actually identify the objects in it. He didn't even put a base coat on the cardboard...it was just off the side of a box.

All the teachers thought it was edgy and provocative. I may have given it more consideration if I hadn't seen him doing it in my backyard at my birthday party the night before it was due.

Another friend took a series of photographs of rubber ducks commiting suicide in various ways.

Both of these ideas MAY have had promise. Maybe. But they were just so badly done, the ideas didn't come across anyway.

Three dots painted on a canvas, he spent about two weeks prior talking about it and how awesome it was going to be.

Later on I discovered he ripped it off from Armin Hoffman.