For an art student, the guidance and experiences a professor shares can shape who you become as an artist.
They grade your work, make suggestions on how to improve and help you learn how to properly present your creations. So it is interesting for studnets to see what their teachers come up with in their own studios.
The Schick Gallery at Skidmore College is showing a selected art faculty exhibition, consisting of art by Kyle Ford, Trish Lyell, Janet Sorenson, Peter Stake and Joanne Vella.
This year, the amount of artists asked to present was cut down significantly so each teacher could show more of their work. The exhibit is diverse - the limit on artists has not limited the amount of creativity present. The work ranges from graphite on paper (Lyell) to oil on canvas (Vella) to archival inkjet prints (Ford).
Ford's work is interesting because it is comprehensive and realistic. He has prints that are so vibrant you'd swear you were there, to photos that are completely unaltered in state.
"The Greatest Show on Earth, Atlanta, Ga." shows a tractor trailer belonging to Ringling Brothers parked on a city street. The truck has cartoonish-looking elephants on the side, and below the truck you can see the feet of an elephant and a passer-by on the street behind it. It is an interesting comparison - the fantasy and the real - which adds dimension to the picture.
The clarity of the photography is seen in another one of Ford's photos, "Expedition Everest: Disney's Animal Kingdom, Orlando, Fla." The picture is so clear, it almost tricks the mind into believing you're there, and the lake below the amusement park ride provides a crisp reflection.
Aside from Ford, Lyell is the only other artist who does not use a paint of some type. Her works - all graphite on paper and presented in groups - show a true emphasis on the light and the dark, and do so by using black, white and gray. The difference in shades creates shapes on these otherwise dark pieces, and the extra effort the eye must make to distinguish them is quite intriguing.
Her counterparts - Vella, Sorenson and Stake - all use a variety of colors in their paintings but do so with different techniques. For example, Joanne Vella uses a heavy hand on her oil-on-canvas paintings, especially "Symbols and Mysteries." This piece shows a woman lying by the pool; the woman is the center of the photo not only because she's placed there but because the light color of her skin stands out so dramatically next to the dark color pattern Vella has chosen. The collage of color (mostly greens and blues) is quite incredible, but even that is overshadowed by the amount of texture used - it's absolutely unreal.
While texture isn't as apparent in the works of Stake and Sorenson, color plays a large role in their paintings. Stake's gouache and pastel pieces are very abstract and use a lot of color, especially vibrant color. He also explores a variety of contrast and uses dark shades of blue, purple and green to replace the excessive use of black.
Sorenson, meanwhile, makes a gradual progression from dark to light, as seen in her six paintings. The paintings combine to show a progression, with each painting separated by an image consisting of blues blending together. The other paintings show contrast with the subject and the background - and what is light and what is dark switches as the work progresses.
The exhibit, while small, takes its viewer through a journey of artistic exploration. While the artists work with many of the same techniques (color and contrast), their interpretation of it comes out completely different. It is exciting to see the result.
The Schick Art Gallery at Skidmore College will show the selected art faculty exhibit through Dec. 6.
Jordan Reardon is a writer for The Post-Star. Read her "Clothes Call" fashion blog on poststar.com. She can be e-mailed at jreardon@poststar.
com.
Posted in Canvassing on Monday, October 19, 2009 6:50 pm | Tags: Canvassing, Art, Gallery, Schick, Skidmore
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