Figurative Works of the Last Exit Show

originally published March 19, 2008

The last Painting and Drawing BFA Exit Show to be held in the current Lamar Dodd School of Art Visual Arts Building, before the school moves to its new East Campus location, opens March 21, with a reception from 7 p.m.– 9 p.m. The artistic influence of figurative artist Diane Edison, the Professor overseeing this semester’s exit show, is evident. Of the works I viewed while visiting the studios, only one was not figurative.

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Family and Friends: Brittney Ducatel and Nicole Goldman have both created sentimental figurative works from photographs of relatives. Ducatel is including a large, closely cropped portrait of her grandfather. Goldman’s image of her nephew and cousin gazing through a window resembles an illustration from the 1940s. The subject feels timeless. Nick Adams originally intended his works to convey a “confrontational eroticism,” but abandoned the idea when he felt he failed to achieve his goal. What he has achieved in his drawings of his friends is a depiction of the male gaze, with a combined realist and graphic aesthetic. In “Anna II,” a woman in her bra leans against a studio doorframe. Her face is drawn in graphite as a portrait with tender details. But her pants, for instance, are drawn in ink with a commercially graphic sensibility, separating the specifics of Adams’s friend from the generalized, sexualized women in magazines.

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Of Flight and Hands: Two artists with a refined subject matter are Sarah Irvin and Augusta Hyland. Irvin uses washes of acrylic paint and graphite to create her images of telephone wires. One painting is of the artist and her husband sitting on a telephone wire. They are visible only from the shoulders down, but I can imagine that their faces are lifted upwards with a defiant spirit, like two birds free to fly and rest where they please, for a moment or an hour. Responding to a commonly heard struggle with drawing and painting hands, Hyland has “jumped right in,” and created a series of hands as portraits, capturing the identity of a person in their hands. Two companion paintings show images of a woman’s hands holding a wine glass, and a man’s hand tearing a label off a beer bottle. Another painting shows a woman’s hands unfastening a bra, as though ending the night.

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The Personal is Universal: Stephanie Clayton, Brandy Levens and Laura Swindall use painting for personal expression. Clayton’s large vertical painting (8’ x 4’) is reminiscent of Gustav Klimt. A central figure dissipates as her garments and body turn into a sea of paint. She is blindfolded, with her mouth open for a scream. But the elegance of the image confuses the emotional reaction, and the screamer could easily be viewed as a dancer. Levens’s bold images of Amelia Earhart and Charles Bukowski also send conflicting messages. With her painting of Earhart, Levens says she hopes to encourage images of powerful women. Bukowski is shown (clothed) reclining with a cigar while a nude woman with a blacked-out face suggestively caresses him. An effective companion for these two pieces is Levens’s psychological portrait of a faceless woman; holding three faces in her arm, she can choose the appropriate face for the moment. One of Swindall’s colorful abstract paintings won an Honorable Mention Award in the Lyndon House Arts Center’s Juried Exhibition. Swindall is including a narrative painting addressing her upcoming move to San Francisco. The painting shows one of her band mates and her family under the UGA arch on one far side of the painting, while the artist and her boyfriend are shown under the Golden Gate Bridge on the other side of the wide canvas. Swindall conveys a joy in the experimental act of painting with her use of splattered paint and circles of color on unprimed canvas. These works provide a personable arena for expression.

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The Message is Clear: While Clayton, Levens and Swindall frolic in the realm of the subconscious, Jacob Copetillo, Libby Morris and Brian Woods each attempt to communicate a precise message. Copetillo’s ceramic tower will be on display in the courtyard during the Senior Exit Show, depicting a progression through history, from Mesopotamian ziggurat structures to Greek Corinthian columns. The seven-and-a-half-foot tower will be illuminated, projecting transparencies into a cube at the top. Copetillo is also displaying a painting encased in a locked box that can only be seen through a sliver between the doors, revealing his interest in enclosing and disclosing, things seen and unseen, and how this duality relates to Christianity. Morris creates portraits of children who are hungry on black paper and portraits of children with cancer on white paper. She hopes to raise awareness of the beauty in these children. With pouting lips and big eyes, these images pull heartstrings. Though it is not immediately clear that some are cancer patients, the hunger in some can be seen in their cheeks. Woods says that his work “attempts to show the generations of African Americans born after 1940 that young African Americans are very aware of the atrocities which occurred this century and that we respect the cultural memory, but we judge our surroundings by the way we perceive them.” His work was not available for viewing at press time, nor was the work of Sodashi Shallow and Claire Wall. These artists will be included in “Wine and Turpentine Senior Exit Show.”

Beth Sale

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