Students Take Campus to Canvas

Azure heavens gently fading into blue over the spire of Mead Chapel, trees ablaze in the colors of fall below; the view going down College Street, past the utility poles, parked cars and language houses to the crimson façade of Twilight Hall; the stark white slopes of the Snow Bowl broken by the elongated charcoal of winter shadows and thrown against a sanguine sunset.

These were just a few of the glimpses at the exhibition, Environmental Observations: Land, Light, and Weather of Autumn, that ran from Thursday, Nov. 28 to Dec. 3 in the Pit Space of Johnson Memorial Building. It featured the works of Professor of Studio Art James Butler’s Painting, Drawing, Photograph, Glass class,  entitled The Landscape Re-Imagined.

Spanning the walls of the exhibit, the paintings were vast, brilliant and captivating panoramas of various Middlebury locations in different natural conditions. They played with the nuances of light and shadow to capture the variegated landscape and climate at the College. A harmony of skillful strokes and vivid hues made the scenes spring to life on the canvas, immersing observers in alternate realities of familiar areas on campus.

No matter your interest or competence in art, you could not have helped being awed by the sheer magnitude and depth of these representations. You would have been compelled to admire each one for minutes on end, to run your eyes up and down and across them to absorb the painstaking detail of every line, shape and shade.

Even for someone who is not an art connoisseur, standing, for instance, in front of a depiction of ivy-adorned Battell complete with slender veins and shade variations in every emerald leaf, one could easily notice the amount of attention given to every square centimeter of canvas, and the way all the minute variations in form and color united to breathe life into a new construction of what was, in actuality, a commonplace hall.

One artist, Yvette Lui ’15, believes that the purpose of the exhibition was to offer novel ways of looking at College settings.

“The course’s title is ‘Re-imagining Landscape,’ so maybe in some way we altered the way that we perceive[d] the campus,” said Lui. “My own drawing piece was titled ‘Day for Night,’ and [was] a composition combining daytime and nighttime views of Johnson.”

Roy Wang ’15 attended the exhibition with his friends. He expressed his enthusiasm for the works on dispay.

“It was great to see the paintings and the ways they portrayed places on campus at different times of the day and in different kinds of weather,” he said. “They made me feel like I was there. The exhibit made me realize how talented people at Middlebury are.”

The Landscape Re-Imaged involves lectures on the history of landscape painting, collaborative studio workshops, personalized instruction and individual artistic development. It provides students with the opportunity to use a combination of oil paint on canvas, color drawing media, photography, and kiln-fused glass to reproduce the lands and buildings of the College in two dimensions. In the final week of this semester, the class will exploring glass and photography.

Environmental Observations was the result of eleven weeks of meticulous imagining, drawing and painting, six hours in class and eight hours outside of class per week, by each of the eleven students in the class. First, every artist picked a campus scene to depict.

“For the drawing, we just [drew] what appeal[ed] to us the most,” Lui said. “I’m very into architecture, so I chose to draw Johnson. We also [had] people drawing and painting the pure landscape.”

Before fall break, each artist drew their chosen landscape from direct observation using markers and the guidance of a plotter-printed photograph of the scene to help them nail the proportions and details. Afterward, they stayed indoors and painted with oil paints and the aid of either their first drawing or a digitally edited plotter-printed photograph.

Lui, who’s taking the course because she aspires to be an architect and wants to hone her ability to draw and paint, reflected on the experience.

“It was indeed a great experience,” she said. “It’s the first time I drew with both the marker and the oil paint. So it took me some time to figure out how they work…Some people come with a more advanced background. Still, I think everyone grows as an artist.”