Grad student wins $10,000 art award

Fine Arts graduate student Tim Stotz didn't pick up a paintbrush until he was 19 years old, but the late start didn't prevent him from winning the $10,000 Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Award for representational painting last month. Stotz, 28, won the prestigious award out of an applicant pool of more than 500. "I think they looked at my work and saw I was speaking with my own voice," he said, adding that he submitted about a dozen paintings to the foundation. Stotz has been painting since freshman year, when he decided to pursue a degree in the arts rather than in electrical engineering as he had planned. Although he had long enjoyed drawing, "a bad experience" with a ninth-grade art teacher initially convinced him to drop artistic endeavors in favor of science and math. He continued to draw for his own enjoyment, however. And when a friend looked at his sketches and encouraged him to try art once more at Randolph-Macon College in Virginia, Stotz reluctantly agreed. It was a decision he would not regret. "It was just, like, an epiphany -- a complete epiphany," he recalled. The next year, Stotz dropped all his engineering courses at Randolph-Macon and switched to fine arts classes. "At some point I decided that I was called to [paint]," he said. "I feel like painting picked me, not that I picked it." After graduating from college, Stotz -- who is currently in the first of two years at the Graduate School of Fine Arts -- alternated between living in New York City and France. His time in France, he said, was the most important part of his training. "I'm the happiest man alive," he mused. "My faith in the transforming power of images has never been undermined." Stotz spends much of his time painting portraits of both himself -- "the cheapest model to hire" -- and friends and professional models. The majority of the pictures he submitted for the foundation award were such paintings. "When you sit down and do a person's portrait, you learn how to get into someone's head," said Stotz, adding that he likes to paint people because of his "profound reverence" for them and his disappointment that human interaction seems to be declining. "Knowledge of other people is endangered," he said. "I've come to really focus on what it takes to know something about someone else." With this in mind, Stotz predicts that portrait painting, along with teaching, will be one of the ways he'll earn his living in the future. Next year, he is hoping to study in Florence, Italy, on a Fulbright Scholarship, a government-sponsored program that encourages student exchange. But Stotz is not yet sure how he will spend his prize money -- though he said he is hoping to use it on an excursion to the Southwest next summer. Like a typical graduate student, though, Stotz said most of the money will likely go to pay bills. And while he conceded that the extra dough is nice, Stotz said the joy he gets from his work is even better: "I gave up on society and found the world."