Ross Art Museum – The Transcript

Ross Art Museum parades faculty talent

Katie Cantrell

Transcript correspondent

kmcantre@owu.edu

Ohio Wesleyan fine arts faculty showed off their talents outside of the classroom last week, displaying their forte in the form of 3-D designs, jewelry, sculptures, oil paintings and digital prints.

The Ross Art Museum opened a new exhibit Wednesday, featuring the works of many of the fine arts faculty members. About 75 people, including OWU President Rock Jones, attended the free public reception from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., which included the musical stylings of the jazz group The Starliners, along with complimentary food and drinks.

The artists on display included:

Associate professor Kristina Bogdanov -sculptures and photo-lithography
Professor Cynthia Cetlin-jewelry
Associate professor Frank Hobbs -oil paintings
Professor Jim Krehbiel – digital prints
Professor Jeff Nilan -photographs
Part-time professor Jonathan Quick – sculptures and 3-D designs

Every artist works their medium differently, so the works within the exhibit took various levels of time to complete. Hobbs said his favorite piece in the exhibit, an oil painting of a bridge construction site, took only two to three sessions, totaling about six or seven hours.

Meanwhile, Krehbiels’ favorite piece, a digital print of a cold sunrise over a mesa as seen from a Pueblo shrine, took 2 ½ years.

Artists face different kinds of challenges, depending on the piece they create. Nilan’s was personal for his favorite piece in the exhibit.

“It was challenging to look back in time and trying to avoid nostalgia and to just try and see what was there,” Nilansaid about his accordion-shaped photobook, with still images from home videos featuring his two sons.

Hobbs’ challenges were more technical for his bridge construction painting.

“Any time you have a painting with this many dark colors and shadows it can be very difficult to work with,” Hobbs said.

Hobbs said he had plenty of motivation to complete the piece, however he was not trying to impart a specific message to his audience.

“My painting process is more of a soliloquy, so it’s like I’m talking to myself. I’m not interested in using art as propaganda,” Hobbs said.

Like challenges, every artist has different motivation driving their work. Sometimes, there’s an underlying message for an audience.

Krehbiel had a very specific motivation in mind when he created his digital print “Cold Sunrise in an Ancient Place,” which depicted a sunrise he watched one cold morning over a mesa from a Pueblo shrine built in the 1200s.

“It was a memory drawing of that along with some rock art and pictographs added in as well,” he said. “I wanted my audience to see the principles of mirroring and reflection in the piece, much like the sun. Movements of the sun are such as cyclical thing.”

The display of faculty art runs through April 5.

Seniors sell art at museum

By Alanna Henderson, Managing Editor

Going once, going twice, sold. With only four days since the opening of the senior art show, 13 pieces have been sold out of 169 total displayed.

The spring senior art exhibit is on full display at the Ross Art Museum until May 13.

The 2017 theme is refraction, which features 13 Bachelor of Arts and Fine Arts senior majors, showcasing their best pieces of work throughout their time earning their degree.

Every senior spring art show, there is a theme or title of the show. Refraction originates from a take on the definition—about a beam of light traversing through many different mediums or mediums of varying density.

The theme is a symbolic re ection on the current graduating class and their experiences verses trying to combine everything together. The focus of the show is about the students as individual artists.

Seniors Louise Goodpasture and Wyatt Hall were the co-chairs of the senior art show. “It’s nice to gain this type of experience…” Goodpasture said. “[The show] teaches you the etiquette of selling yourself to galleries, and knowing how to act professionally and graciously with a museum.”

Goodpasture has sold a set of cups with detailing’s of birds. While not every piece on display is for sale, there are high hopes of selling almost every piece by the end of the show.

10 percent of the proceeds are donated back to the Ross Art Museum. The artist based on mediums and materials used will often determine the prices, but they can discuss the values with professors if desired.

Students will often begin thinking about what to showcase since determining the major. There is a wide variety of art currently on display and each year, the pieces in the show will vary. Some senior shows could include majority sculptures and other years, more displays of photographs. In this years art show, there are a wide variety of pieces for viewing and selling.

Senior BFA major Lexy Immerman has several pieces on display at the show in- cluding graphic work, a book layout, photographs, and metalwork.

“My pieces are unrelated… but I do want people to appreciate the design of everything,” Immerman said. “I want people to see the creative solution I applied and go, ‘Oh, that makes sense, I see why she did that, and it works.’”

Admission to the show is free and is open to Ohio Wesleyan students and the Delaware community through graduation.

“I love talking to people, and seeing how they receive my work…This was the rst opportunity any of the seniors had to truly take a look at what our class does … I was really stunned by the talent in my class,” Immerman said. “I’m proud to be graduating with them.”

Landscape artist comes to OWU

By: Katie Kuckelheim, Transcript correspondent

Panoramic paintings of urban and rural landscapes in oil called “Matter of Fact,” an exhibition at Ross Art Museum, is a collection of paintings in plein-air by Todd Gordon.

PleinAir, according to professor Frank Hobbs in the fine arts department, is, “Painting or drawing… on site, rather than in a studio or from photographs or drawings.”

Gordon explained, “These regions are typically overlooked as mundane …industrial, or even ugly, but, as a painter, I find them profoundly interesting visually in their wealth of various shapes, colors, textures, and spatial relationships.”

The reasoning for coming to OWU, Justin Kronewetter, the director of the Ross Art Museum, explained was, “because he grew up in Delaware and many of the local residents know the artist and his artwork.”

Growing up in Delaware, it is “distant and familiar” for Gordon to display his art outside of his New York Gallery.

Gordon is coming to OWU on Thursday, Oct. 22 to talk to residents and students alike in the R.W. Corns Buildings, Room 312, at 7 p.m. about his art. A reception follows the presentation from 8-10 p.m. at the Ross Art Museum.

Gordon said, “I plan to give a brief presentation about my work, focusing on my artistic process as an observational painter who makes representational landscape paintings.”

Kronewetter said, “We anticipate a large turnout.”

Gordon expressed his excitement “to share this experience with the students and faculty at OWU and the local community.”

Hobbs, a pleinair artist himself, said, “The work is impressive in its scope and in its honest attempt to capture a personal view of the urban environments in which the artist lives. The paintings owe a large debt to another, older contemporary painter, Rackstraw Downes, who also works on site in urban settings and takes in similarly wide angles of view.”

Gordon’s “Matter of Fact” is currently on display at the Ross Art Museum until Nov. 13.

The museum’s hours are Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursday 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m.

Beginnings, evolvements and connecting threads: Ohio artist to be featured at the Ross

Edmund Kuehn's "The Village." Photo courtesy of kenygalleries.com. — Edmund Kuehn’s “The Village.” Photo courtesy of kenygalleries.com.

Ohio Wesleyan students, Delaware residents and anyone else interested in Ohio artists may consider stopping by the Ross Art Museum Feb. 24 to April 5.

During this time, 75 pieces by the late central Ohio-based artist Edmund Kuehn will be on display. Announced on the Connect2 OWU blog, the exhibition will be called “Edmund Kuehn: A Retrospective (1937-2011).”

James Keny, co-director of the Keny Art Gallery in Columbus and who represented Kuehn since the 1980s, said the show will have three distinct components, each showing a different phase of Kuehn’s art.

“What we’ve done with the show itself is show the many modes of Keuhn,” Keny said. “He liked that expression. He didn’t like to be confined.”

This includes the two figure paintings that won Kuehn a rare scholarship to the Art Students League of New York in 1937; figure scenes from the 1950s that blend classic elements with modern styles; and small-scale abstractions Kuehn worked on in the later part of his life.

Most are works on paper, painted with acrylics and casein, though a few pieces are oil on canvas. A few works will also be for sale.

Keny said he hopes Kuehn’s displayed works will be inspiring to students and other patrons of the museum.

“He was a very young guy who came from industrial Columbus, scrapped his way through art school…he made a career for himself,” Keny said.

Keny also said he thought Kuehn was a good complement to the liberal arts component at OWU.

“He continued learning, reading, going to galleries,” Keny said.

Kuehn was also a teacher of the arts. He taught at the Columbus College of Art and Design (then the Columbus Art School) and curated at the Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts (now the Columbus Museum of Art).

“He was respected for his ability to teach and inform people about modern art,” Keny said. “Which was kind of intimidating in this Midwestern town.”

Keny said he hopes the Kuehn paintings will bring more than just OWU students to the Ross Art Museum.

“Keuhn is a widely collected artist in Ohio,” Keny said. “We’re hoping patrons of his work will be introduced to the Ross. It’s a real treasure not many of them know about.”