Sticks, sugar, plexiglass, canvas and neon orange paint are just a few of the materials in the paintings of the three Studio Art interns whose works go on exhibit today at the Jaffe-Friede and Strauss Gallery in the Hopkins Center.
The opening reception is today at 4:30 p.m.
Artists Enrico Riley '95, Marcin Ramocki '95 and Chuck Ross '95 were this year's interns at the Studio Arts department. They were chosen by the art faculty on the basis of their work as undergraduate Studio Art majors.
In the year after graduation, interns help teach classes and work as monitors in the art studios in exchange for studio space and the funding to pursue their artistic goals.
The Perspective on Design exhibit is the culmination of the year's work, a chance for the young artists to show a significant body of their work in a gallery open to the public.
Deborah Donavan, the administrative assistant for the Studio Art Exhibition Program, helped the artists hang up their work in the studio. She said all three artists had exhibited at the Senior Show before their graduation, but since they were allowed to put up only one painting, conveying the depth and continuity of their work was difficult.
Ross's paintings occupy the gallery's corner room. Entering it, you feel suddenly in the presence of the symbiosis of art and nature in Ross's work. On his canvasses, thick, brightly colored paints are hardened over twigs, acorns, leaves and other unnamable bits and pieces of forest matter he picked up in the woods.
In one of Ross's most impressive paintings, he has created a tree out of twigs and leaves and paint. But stepping back you get the distinct feeling of peering down at the forest floor. No tree, no art, just soil and sticks.
Ross said he paints out in the woods where "an immense food for the self and for life," he said.
"I wouldn't say my work is 'inspired' by nature as much as it is a collaboration with natural forces," Ross said. "Even the way the paint dries is fantastically interesting and rich."
Ross said he paints out in the woods and lays his canvases flat on the ground. Sometimes he leaves his paintings outside in the rain so they will be exposed to the elements in the same way as something living in the forest.
In the work entitled "The mountains that smoke," Ross seems to have captured in paint the essence of fire. Across the canvas, tongues of flame curl in ways that show both Ross's deliberate brush and his care for the way paints "move, solidify, crystallize and molt together" on their own.
The painting seems not so much to have been painted as to have occurred naturally, to have responded both to Ross's brush and to the physical laws of the paint itself.
Riley's work specializes in abstract layers upon layers of paint across which he has dripped long lines of paint so thick they stand in relief from the canvass.
Since Riley paints in a series of layers, his work has depth of composition in addition to planar composition. He decides when interior layers show through the layer he is painting on top.
In one painting, two dark brown, box-like forms are mired in a smoke like layer of reddish paint which Riley painted on top. In another, a sliver of neon orange paint peeks through a haze of beige and gray which shifts shade as it crosses the large canvas.
Since his composition is both across and inward, Riley said, each brush stroke is a reaction to what is beneath, as well as what is to the side. In this way, each painting is an evolution from an original idea.
"Although you begin with one feeling, the direction you go in is defined by what you put down," he said.
The subject of his painting is largely open to interpretation, he said. "I try to gently nudge viewers and allow them to fill in and create their viewing experience."
Each painting represents a different emotional state or personality, he said. He tries to keep the general mood of his paintings "uplifting and positive," but any way his viewer perceives his work is fine with him, he said.
Ramocki's paintings hang in the left area of the gallery. He combines abstract clouds of color with recognizable forms like human busts spirals that hover in the space of his canvas.
Over most of his paintings, he has drawn rigid arrays, like the lines of latitude and longitude on a map. But Ramocki said he did not intend to evoke topography but the imagery and composition of cyberspace.
Many of his works are on plexi-glass to resemble computer screens.
However, Ramocki said he is not trying to deliver commentary on the computer-age or the capitalism which drives it.
"It's not a comment on cyberspace, but art in the terms of cyberspace," he said. Indeed, Ramocki's compositions do have a distinctly computer composed feel that goes beyond the plexi-glass and the graph-paper arrays he paints on top.
Shapes, like the spiral, seem to show up wherever Ramocki felt they should be, as though he had dragged and left them there with a mouse.
Ramocki, Riley and Ross all said they were excited to have their works exhibited in a public gallery, accessible to the eyes of critiques other than their art teachers and friends.
"It's a beginning of future kind of communication with people," Ramocki said. "I want to see what people have to say, and to see whether its understood, or rejected."
