Thesis and Exhibition Fall 2013: Sentimental Art: Is that a compliment?

I do not perceive the work I make to be sentimental. However, If one walks into my current studio, as a critic of mine did this past Monday, they will find two pieces that hold a large aspect of sentimentality to them. The first, I completed in December of 2012, which is a painting of my grandmother that has, for lack of a better phrase, gone through the ringer, to make her appear as if she is there, but actually is not. The Second work, which I completed on September 23, came on the heels of my late dog. I recognize there is a slight pattern but is it not okay as an artist to make work solely for myself? I mean Goya did it at the end of his life in the fourteen Black Paintings, no one was suppose to see them, and now he's even more brilliant because of them. Granted I am not Goya, but why is it not okay, for me as an emerging artist, in the mists of experimentation to play around with my emotions? To help better my understanding of my critic's observation of these pieces, I took to a JSTOR article titled On Kitsch and Sentimentality by Robert C. Solomon. Solomon, starts off by saying that "These days, its better for a young aspiring artist to offend and disgust the viewer than evoke such gentile and sentimental emotions." The author also makes it a point to say that now a days it is better to be shocking or sour than sweet. Well if you look at the images below, I'm not at all certain if the words sweet, wide eyed puppies, and other tender synonyms, come to mind when looking at these images. Finally, Solomon states, that to call someone a sentimentalist in art, is dismissing both the person and their views from serious consideration. This brings me back to my first point; since I have a studio at school, that is marginally private, where I'm suppose to be constantly making work, why are my cathartic works dismissed when they were not suppose to be a topic of discussion in the first place?

For the full article, click this link below:

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/431644?uid=3739808&uid=2129&uid=2134&uid=374340001&uid=2&uid=70&uid=3&uid=374339991&uid=3739256&uid=60&purchase-type=none&accessType=none&sid=21102654521551&showMyJstorPss=false&seq=13&showAccess=false