According to Bonaventure’s senior visual arts majors, the university’s visual arts program has shattered their pre-undergraduate artistic boundaries. Their exhibition last Saturday was proof of that.
On April 23, students, faculty and staff gathered in Francis Hall’s San Damiano Room, home to the annual 720/1 Senior Art Exhibition. The two-hour-long showing, displaying a variety of three senior artist’s undergraduate work, included speeches by the artists, time for viewing and refreshments.
This year’s featured artists: Michelle Denmark, Toni Nicosia and Alana Fallon.
While all three students are nearing the end of their college careers, they said their artistic ventures had very different starting points.
Denmark, who’s also majoring in art history, said she’s inspired by the larger-than-life creations of Japanese cartoons.
“My early artistic influences came from Japanese manga and anime,” said Demark. “…It’s continued to influence my art because that is the style of art that I create.”
Denmark said while dozens of her completed pieces were on display, she had one favorite in the bunch.
“My favorite piece that I’ve created was a piece I created last year for my Drawing 2 class,” said Denmark. “The piece is titled ‘My Soul is a Garden Filled with Unseen Thorns.’ It was meant to be an abstract self portrait that I created using different natural elements to create the facial features. For example, the hair is made up of hundreds of rose petals and the lips are a pair of leaves.”
Much like Denmark’s nature-based piece, Nicosia said a great deal of her pieces are inspired by the natural world.
“Most of my displayed pieces are related to nature and feature bright colors,” said Nicosia. “I want my viewer to feel like they are inside a piece of my work.”
Outside her current nature-based inspirations, Nicosia said her father served as her early creative muse.
“He never pursued art professionally, but everywhere he went he was drawing things,” said Nicosia. “Picking things up in my house and laughing at his little drawings on people in the newspaper or on old mail always made my day. It always made me want to create things that make other people happy.”
While Nicosia draws on outside sources for inspiration, Fallon, a self-proclaimed “photographer by nature,” said her own photographic work serves as the basis for her current artistic ventures.
According to Fallon, one of her favorite recreations, “My Cup of Tea” (which was originally a photograph), features both she and her boyfriend. “My Cup of Tea” was one of her 60 pieces on display in the exhibition.
“This large piece is a 4ft x 4ft cube with many layers, which is commonly called a tunnel book when made of paper,” said Fallon. “It showcases the use of colors in my life varying from black, gray, blue and white to exhibit the love of my life in visual form.”
Fallon added that another one of her most prized creations, again, started with a photo she took, this time of a stem cell through a microscope.
“This year I had the opportunity to create large-scale paintings from photographs I took using the biology department’s photographic microscope,” said Fallon. “I took a series of photographs of cheek cells, which are displayed as modified photographs, onion cells, which are displayed as large-scale abstract paintings and charcoal pastel drawings, and even dust, which again are displayed as large-scale paintings.”
Although each of the exhibition’s featured artists come from differing backgrounds and have preferred mediums, each agreed that Bonaventure has exposed them to styles and techniques they were unskilled in before their enrollment in the university.
For Fallon, Bonaventure taught her nearly everything she knows about art outside of photography.
“I didn’t take art classes in high school,” said Fallon. “Here, I learned how to paint in watercolor, acrylic and oil…I learned how to draw using all kinds of medias…I learned how to sculpt in terracotta clay, something I never would’ve thought of doing.”
For Denmark and Nicosia, Bonaventure’s visual arts program furthered the skills they already held entering college.
“Before coming here I only had a few mediums I was comfortable with; now I can look at anything and find a way to make it art,” said Nicosia.
mcgurllt14@bonaventure.edu
