Exhibit injects color into campus scenery

Nine different landscapes sprang from the same assignment; their angles and depths, mirroring reality, are soaked with the light and color produced from the mind. Descend into the Johnson Memorial Building’s pit space to find the outside brought inside by means of the drawings, photo collages and oil paintings of eight nascent artists, students in Jim Butler’s art course entitled “Imagining the Landscape — Painting, Drawing, Photography, Glass.”

Professor of Studio Art Jim Butler challenged this class to recreate a particular on-campus landscape with a maintained size scale across different mediums. Students began with marker and pen drawings on paper and translated those into oils on canvas. They worked on these projects for the length of the fall, getting to know their chosen part of the College landscape better than anyone on campus. Butler taught them to look at the world at the microcosm and macrocosm level, to discern the relation of details to the greater scope of the scenes.

It was clear that these students have a keen sense of corners and periphery. For instance, Brittany Lehnhart ’11 created a rich, saturated oil painting that tempts the viewer to step into it like a door. A close-up of a tree branch in the upper left hand corner and a spread of buildings in the background generates an incredibly compelling sense of depth. Every artist used the entire canvas to capture the scene like the lens of a camera, but interpreted into what they individually saw. No student had the same vision as another; each portrayed wildly different perspectives of the relatively limited landscape they could explore with extraordinary precision.

Evan Masseau ’11 captured an impressionistic view from behind one of our iconic Adirondack chairs, long-since magicked away for the winter months by Middlebury’s grounds maintenance, and preserved memories of warmer weather in bright daubs of paint.

A piece by Amy Doucette ’12 features an ocean speckled with white froth that undulates by a set of golden steps, transforming seas of concrete into a lovely otherworld. When asked what it was like to take a class with Butler, the art major mentioned an anecdote from when she was facing a creative roadblock.
“One day, Jim was just like, ‘Amy, why don’t you just go [lie] down on the pavement and see what it feels like,’” Doucette said. Butler’s unconventional style of teaching and the students’ final products demonstrate how he clearly inspired the students to open their perspectives and discover a new awareness of place.
The set that possessed the most unique style was Ilsa Shea ’11’s landscape, rendered first in paper, tape, white spray paint, gesso and white-out and then textured cream oils — a seemingly angular fragmentation of a world in cream that actually achieves a staggeringly precise rendition of the front architecture of the Johnson building and its staircase.

Of her different approach, Shea said, “I wanted to create a landscape with minimal information … define space and volumes through shifts in textures and densities of white.” Her process produced a distinctively mature work of art, in effect, stripping the view of a landscape down to its fundamental lines through building up various “hues of white” and mastering minimalism while capturing the entirety of a place.

Butler’s students dove into the solemn, grand genre of Ansel Adams and made it fun. Their landscape representations boast an obvious atmosphere of playfulness and could, on some level, be labeled as pop art, daringly and laughingly dressing realism in sassy neon. Their works also dispel fears of stasis and boredom in landscape drawings; the pieces swirled, danced, jarred and asserted movement in even the most solid of structures, buildings, trees and earth.

The scenes fit Johnson’s pit space in a clever way. With their graffiti-like aesthetic, they convey an appearance of skillful guerilla art that could be painted on the walls of subway stations in New York City — colorful, feisty expressions that would make an underground commuter smile and bring light and life to a gritty, dark space. Even though many works portray the campus’s natural beauty with swaths of plants and trees, their presentation has a distinctly urban feel, stimulated by the unnatural colors and exaggerated lushness of textures and patterns and the contrast of the flora with the sharp lines of building architecture.

The most hilarious work that I believe ties this exhibit to the uniquely “Middlebury experience” was Tasha Woodworth ’11’s ode to the College’s infamous, bizarrely outgoing and gregarious squirrel population. One blue and one pink squirrel peer out from a butter-cream-yellow and cotton-candy-pink background with dark eyes straight from the real world that glimmer uncomfortably with just a little too much intelligence.