Meet Winston Chmielinski, Scholastic Awards winner and resident at the Alliance’s Atelier. Winston is one of five residents creating new works of art in our first ever artists-in-residency program.
What is your connection to the Scholastic Awards? In 2006, I submitted a few paintings of enormous heads of my sister’s friends, which made it through to the national-level awards show at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C. It is still the best thing on my CV!
Describe your experience at the Atelier. I feel like I’m one among a chosen few to have been gifted the artist’s holy trinity of space, opportunity, and support by the hardworking and devoted Alliance for Young Artists & Writers staff.
Meeting the validators of my early forays into art has been a very humbling experience. I realize that they’re just people who care a hell of a lot, going so far as to buy organic cheese for our open studio events…though that may be entirely on the part of our program leader, Danniel, who also (this is not a plug) grows her own vegetables!
I graduated from NYU this past May and quickly saw my art practice devolve into a virtual reality, with actual time and square-footage relinquished to, respectively, a job and a comfortable bed. I credit the Alliance for developing a sort of “tease-me-back” toolkit, with perfect timing being a coincidence (I was recently evicted from my former living/work space), by giving me the opportunity to work in the Atelier.
What are your long-term goals as an artist? Painting is like taking steps in an ambiguous direction and leaving a bread crumb trail, so I guess my ultimate goal is to make ‘art-making’ the given and go out from there.
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Winston Chmielinski highlights the non-performativity of his subjects, bringing out unconscious or believed-to-be-unnoticed bodily expressions with gestural panes of paint – not in an attempt to reveal anything specific about the subject, but rather to relate something felt and familiar. He is a recent graduate of New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study where he concentrated in Philosophy and Creative writing, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Check out more of his work at: http://www.wi-ch.com
Have a question for Winston or our other resident artists? Tweet it @artandwriting using #AWatelier.