Fluffy Dog Blog : September 2015

Daphne Allen

ART 116

September 15, 2015

Juried Alumni Art Exhibition

On September 10, I attended the Foreman Galleries first art exhibition of the semester. The Juried Alumni Exhibition showed a collection of art from former Hartwick students in past years. I noticed a variety of art work from paintings on canvas with oil paint to painting with oil paint on wood. On the lower levels I looked at ceramic pieces, blown glass pieces, and sculpture pieces using everyday objects.

Pieces of work that caught my eye were large oil paintings on large canvases. There was one black and white sketch of a jacket and to the right were three larger oil paintings of similar jackets. My two favorites were Spring Coat and Christmas Coat, both painted by Patricia Carrigan, 1982. They were representations of spring and winter jackets, using a chunkier paint and large brush strokes. The backgrounds of the jackets were very interesting when compared to the jacket that they were helping to display. The jackets seemed to blend in with the background making the paintings very abstract. I could see a really good use of shadows on the canvas and how the artist used the thickness of the paint to play with texture as well. These paintings did a really nice job telling the story of what jacket the artist may have wanted to depict. I found that the winter jacket was my favorite. With the use of the purples and the blues I thought the overall effect was communicated clearly.

I got the chance to talk to Lauren Gould, who graduated in 2013, about her painting, Driving Home, displayed upstairs in the gallery. The painting was not very large but the colors and the texture were really bright and prominent. She used acrylics for the bright colors of the fall trees and the thick grass that formed around the road in the painting. I was more curious about the type of material that she used to make the texture so thick, and how it popped off the page. Lauren talked to me about how she used a material called self-leveling jell or tar jell. A jell that you laid down on a surface and waited to dry and then peeled and applied to the painting. I thought the texture was fantastic and really made the painting successful.

I gained a bit of knowledge about materials I can use on canvas other than just paints. I observed different techniques to getting the message across to the viewer and looked more closely at abstract views and layers of information on the canvas.