The sixth annual exhibit hosted by Edinboro’s Drawing and Painting Club, Feb. 24 in Bates Gallery, happened alongside Art Night, an opportunity for high school juniors and seniors to tour the campus’ studios.
While many of the parents of the art-inclined and potentially incoming freshmen weren’t eager to have their children share thoughts with the press, freshman, D+P member, and participant in last year’s Art Night, Kristina Kaiser, was more than obliged to opine on what was going on in the minds of those on tour.
“Art Night sold me to come here,” she said. “I was accepted to a couple other schools, but this gave me an opportunity to actually talk with the professors I’d be working with, which was so much more helpful than just getting walked around the campus by a guide who doesn’t really know what’s going on.”
Although her works were presumably hanging on the walls of galleries other than Bates’ during the show— “Next year!” she assured— fellow club members John Christ and Jason Williams were eager to discuss their inclusions.
Christ, a senior who hopes the school’s looming bureaucracy won’t impede his graduation this spring, discussed his graphite drawing, Window, and the process surrounding it.
“I look at an image or object and see what I can do to abstract it to see what visually-compelling images can be found within it. It’s a way of looking at details rather than the overall scene.”
Recently, directing attention to such areas in his piece, “I’ve been making compositions that require a lot of planning, but I’m thinking about how to use more spontaneity with what I might be working on later.”
Williams’ painting, “Collision Course no. 2,” a black-and-white mixed media abstraction inferring a car crash, left its viewer wondering where the crash may be.
“This is actually only one of its panels; they were kind of saying there wasn’t enough room to hang the other three.”
Clarifying Collision’s color neutrality, he explained choosing such a scheme was a means of “keeping it simple” while studying how the structures of its spray paint and oil-based enamels interact with one another.
Its dual focus was to observe objects in motion while mimicking the speed of a machine; speaking kindly of influence Jackson Pollock, Williams modestly admitted to being referred to with an equally clumsy nickname on occasion— will the subsequent works of Racin’ Jason be coming to Paris, Berlin and the Guggenheim in the not-so-distant future?
With both these two pieces amid 18 others being on display, group president Zach Pontius expressed excitement the two events were taking place on the same evening. He remarked on how the high schoolers being filed through were able to see directly the high-level quality of work produced by Edinboro students as evidenced by the juried exhibit.
Speaking of the club itself, Kaiser is grateful to have found it.
“I’ve been a part of several others, but nothing really took hold,” she said. “But with Drawing and Painting, it’s really helped me feel like I’ve become involved with what’s happening on campus…I’ve never been interviewed by a newspaper before, so things are looking up!”
Be the first to comment on this article!