Art Gallery- essay 2

Walking into the Student Arts Gallery and seeing the SynArts Cotillion exhibit in Woods Hall, I was amazed at all the different types of artwork. Not only were there paintings, in addition there were sculptures, modern art, and abstract art. When you first walked into the exhibit, the thing that caught your eyes was this bale of shredded paper that had diamond shaped pieces of paper. It made you wonder how on earth that bale of paper could hold its form and how the artist got it there in the first place. When artists create a piece, they usually have an inspiration for making it, or a reason why they did. Each viewer though has their own interpretation on what they see in the picture.

The first piece that I saw when I walked into the art show was Anden Oden’s wooden guitar like lute. The design of this lute was loosely based on the early 16th century work of Hans Frei of Bologna. Most of the lutes that Hans Frei made were originally made with 6 courses, or eleven strings. Like many other lutes of this time period, they were rebuilt to accommodate the musical needs of the next 200 years. The guitar like lute on display in the art show has a back that is made of maple and a soundboard made out of spruce. The neck and peg box are made out of poplar veneered with ebony. When looking head on at the lute, you notice this very intricate design where the sound goes into the instrument to produce that lovely sound. The frets on the lute go all the way around the neck. The neck is bent backwards almost at a 90-degree angle. The design of the black ebony on the neck continues down into the soundbox of the guitar just a little with this design like upside down cat ears. The shape of the soundbox area is very egg-shaped. Looking at the rounded back of the lute, you notice that it is not a completely smooth rounded back. It has flat straight edges that continue all the way around the back.

The next piece of artwork that I looked at was this collection of five tin plate pictures made by Jenny Fine. It is a type of art that is called collodian wet plates. This process is done by getting a lot of toxic chemicals to stay on the painting easily. If not careful, cyanide gas can easily be produced, which is a very harmful gas. The title of the picture is called Bowed Down. When I first glanced at this picture, it reminded me of the girl from the movie The Ring. In it, there is a girl who seems to be bending over with her hands loosely hanging down as if she was a puppet. The girl has her head turned towards the right and is blankly staring out into the distance. Her hair is up in a loose ponytail, but she has a few strands of hair that have fallen into her face. She has on a white dress and it looks like she also has on a pair of sandals. She is outside and in front of an old dirty white building. The ground she is standing on looks a little bit rocky and muddy, but everywhere else is just grass. It looks like there is a fabric sheet hanging on the left side of the wall.

I could imagine someone playing the guitar like lute in the picture Bowed down. The setting looks as if an old man would come walking right around the corner, sit down on a chair, and start playing some old folk songs. These two pieces of artwork do not have anything in common. The lute is made out of many different types of wood while the picture is made from a procedure called collodian wet plates.

This art gallery was very nice. I enjoyed looking at all of the students’ work and found it interesting to think about how long it took them to make that one piece of work. Being in an art class in high school, I know a little about how long it takes for a project to get finished, and I was only ever in art one. I can only imagine that it would be even more time consuming that anything we ever did in class. I would absolutely recommend going to see this art gallery to people, because these students are very good at what they do, at least of what I have seen.