Behind the Artists of the Fall Concentration
If you visited the Art History Building this month, you might have noticed more art than usual. That’s because the Fall Concentration Exhibition was on display from November 8 to the 19. The exhibition is presented yearly in partial fulfillment of the Concentration in Studio Art at UD. This year, the exhibition displayed the works of three different seniors pursuing art concentrations.
Tiffany Shirley, a senior business major, is the artist behind a beautiful set of four ceramic clocks. Shirley said, “I originally came in as a painting concentration, and my art professor told me to take ceramics… she knew what she was doing because I really liked it.” The clocks were inspired by Shirley’s junior research and taking the Ceramics I class.
Shirley’s clocks carry the theme of feeling at home. Shirely said, “I had just come back from Rome over the summer and I saw so much artwork over there that was so inspiring but very overwhelming. I came back and felt very lost and homesick, so I wanted to make places that remind me of home.” Texas, Italy and Mexico all come to life in Shirley’s pottery work, but the tour de force is Shirley’s koi fish clock. Shirley said, “The koi fish represent the battle of being and feeling lost, as well as the virtue of perseverance that comes with overcoming those feelings.”
Elizabeth Rudolph is a senior English major with a passion for painting. She received one of the departmental art scholarships her freshman year and has taken an art class every semester. Rudolph’s paintings are centered around finding everyday beauty. Rudolph said, “During my time at UD, I’ve been thinking a lot about beauty and beauty’s role in art. All of my paintings are about things that I find beautiful. I will see things that I didn’t expect to be beautiful and think, ‘I want to paint that’… A lot of times it’s just serendipitous and I run into something I want to paint.”
Rudolph’s work is all done in oil on canvas, but ranges widely in size. Four small square canvases about the size of a hand depict small instances of beauty in great detail. In contrast, directly next to them hangs a 4×5 foot canvas of a flower arrangement inspired by the flowers at the foot of the altar in UD’s own Church of the Incarnation. The flowers, which were Rudolph’s largest painting, took approximately a month to paint, with Rudolph spending at least two hours a day on this stunning work of realism.
For NgocThanh “Liz” Tran, art is a fact of life. Tran is a senior business major who has pursued an art concentration since freshman year. Tran said, “Doing art is also a great source of stress relief for me…it’s nice to have time to be creative and keep the right side of my brain alive.”
Tran’s concentration focuses on ceramics, and her collection is centered around the concept of the darker side of the dream world and sleeping. Tran said, “Usually, people think that it is reality that affects what you dream, but my collection represents the other side – where nightmares affect your reality.”
The defining piece of Tran’s collection is called “Please Wake Up.” It was the first piece in her collection and set the tone and direction for the rest of the collection. Tran said, “This piece has my side profile etched into it and shows my life source being drained, which represents how the nightmares I have drain me. I gave the piece the name it has because I say it every time I’m having those non-lucid dreams. Even though it has a darker story behind it, it’s my favorite because it sums up the rest of the “vessels” pretty well and acts as a sort of center piece.
The art concentration, culminating in the Fall Concentration Exhibition, holds a different journey for each artist. Rudolph said, “Throughout the course of the paintings, you can see a progression of myself finding my style of painting: finding what kind of art I like, figuring out why it appeals to me, and then trying to replicate that in my own paintings.”
