Woods Hall Gallery - Paper 2

Jared Sims
English 101
Weinstein
23 September 2007


Art is a topic I haven’t cared about my whole life till I was made to care about by this paper. Growing up, I associated art with those museums you were forced to go to on a school field trip. Upon realization that I was going to have to go an art gallery I was pretty unhappy with the idea. As I walked around and looked at the different artist’s pieces it made me rethink my approach about art. The art gallery in Wood’s Hall was genuine in the fact that I noticed little details about the pieces that I had never thought about before. Artists generally put a lot more work into their work than most people could imagine.

A good number of the pieces in the gallery did not catch my eye. Two particular pieces by the same artist stuck out like a sore thumb in this gallery. The first of the two, being Chris Davenport’s piece, “Egg Patrol”, brought a surge of curiosity into my mind. In general, the piece had a gloomy appearance with dark skies and bright lightning in the background. A woman, who is dressed in a red dress, is handing some type of officer an egg of some sort. The officer seems to be upbeat, with a big smile on his face, almost as he just arrived home from war. Two elderly people are depicted in the background in which both are holding children, possibly their grandchildren. The biggest question mark in my mind is why all of the people in the picture are on top of a big bird’s nest with an egg in the middle of it. I got a very patriotic feeling after viewing this particular piece. The woman seems to know the officer on a very personal level. I get the vibe that the officer and woman are married and he has just returned from war from the big smiles on each of their faces. The grandparent’s look like they are taking care of their grandchildren, who possibly may be the children of woman and officer. The two eggs in the piece represent two different things to me. The big egg in the nest symbolizes war to me. I feel that the grandchildren have their grandchildren because the kid’s father, their son, has been off at war and the kid’s mother is working. The small egg the woman is handing the officer seems to be a welcome back present from the war, shown in the big smiles on each of their faces. The lightning in the piece lights up the whole picture like the light in the end of a very long tunnel.

Chris Davenport’s second piece, “Untitled”, caught my eye for the same reasons his other piece did. Each of the pieces had a very colorful appearance, but in the same sense a very gloomy appearance. I get a mischievous yet rebellious feel from this piece. A man appearing as a member of the mafia seems to attempting to evade a police officer, each having blindfolds on their eyes. A zeppelin is pictured ablaze in the sky while small children are jumping over a car in the background. A man is pictured holding a hammer type tool. The whole situation reminds of the early 1900s when zeppelins were being developed along with the whole mafia scene was just getting big in America. The blindfolds pictured on the mafia member and police officer seems to signify the fact that the police knew the mafia were doing wrong but couldn’t control them. In the early 1900s, a lot of mafia crime was very secret and police knew it was going on, but either didn’t have enough evidence or power to stop it. The children in the background jumping over the car is what gave me the feeling of rebellion in the picture. It appears as if the children are just having fun, not caring what is right or wrong. The zeppelin gives me the feeling that the picture was based in the time when the zeppelin was being developed, which was the early 1900s. The man holding the large mallet seems to be the law of the land that is attempting to smite the problems at the time.


Chris Davenport used oil based paint on each of his pieces of art. The oil based paint seemed to give the pieces a spacey, psychedelic look. Each of the pieces both gave off a very gloomy, yet colorful feeling. I noticed in each of the pieces that a backlight was used to light up a portion of the picture. It seems as if the backlight in each picture lit up the whole picture and the actual controversy in the picture was lit up by the backlight. The most interesting detail I acquired from viewing the pieces is how instead of their being a border, the picture overlapped where the border would normally be to give it a 3D effect. Both pieces seemed as if they were based in the early to mid 1900s. I also noticed each piece had a central conflict but also had secondary conflict happening in the background that made you try to relate between the central conflict and secondary conflict.

Being my first experience in an art gallery, I would definitely recommend this art gallery to the public simply from the fact that it grabbed my attention. As previously stated, I had no interest at all in art until I entered this gallery and analyzed the pieces. Art is truly unique, it makes you use your mind, analyze, and come to a conclusion as to what you feel is the true reason behind what the artist was attempting to express in their piece. Some cherish art, others have no feel for it, but one thing can be concluded, which is that art is one of a kind.