By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Some paintings in the traveling exhibit “On Being: Realism and the BGSU School of Art Painting and Drawing Program” look like they could be photographs. Others look almost too real to be photographs.
The exhibit opened Friday in Fort Wayne’s Artlink Contemporary Art Gallery, the second stop, on the three-city tour. The exhibit will be on display there through Sept. 13. The final location will be in ArtSpace in Lima, from Sept. 27 through Oct. 26. The first stop was in Detroit.
“On Being” focuses on the continued dedication to representational art, and not just any representational art.
Dennis Wojtkiewicz, one of the organizers who has taught painting at BGSU since 1988, said the work is distinguished by a certain level of resolution. “It’s not quite hyper realism, but a high-focus kind of realism. That’s what we were attempting to showcase.”
Wojtkiewicz is represented by one of his signature large-scale paintings of fruit. The cantaloupe’s flesh is suffused with light. The viewer can almost taste how sweet it is.
While the paintings are united in this concentration of realism, they cover a range of subjects from nudes by Martha Gaustad and Matt Cook to a quartet of sticks, depicted in a line byLaura Barnhardt Corle.
The artists survey the world around them. That may be the folks who work in the local deli in work by Valerie Escobedo, or a toy car creature left out in the snow by Brandon Briggs, who organized the show with Wojtkiewicz.
Briggs recalls that Wojtkiewicz first posited the idea for the show while they were traveling in Chicago leading a group of students. The Marathon Gallery in Findlay was asking for show proposals, and Wojtkiewicz suggested doing a BGSU-themed show. Ironically plans to hang the show at the Findlay gallery never panned out.
Wojtkiewicz started putting together a list of names. They range from emeritus professor and former director of the school Tom Hilty, who now collaborates with his wife, Tamara Monk, a BGSU alumna, to recent graduates — 26 artists in all each represented by one work.
Several of the artists represented worked with the late Patrick Betaudier, a Trinidadian-born French artist, who espoused the classical technique mixte.
Betaudier came to BGSU for several summers and led workshops, and a couple students have traveled to France to work with his son-in-law.
Wojtkiewicz said while the work in the show falls under the umbrella of realism, “it’s all about a certain kind of approach to realist painting.”
Artists using this process build up the image in multiple layers. In the case of Hilty and Monk, he does the initial drawing — because of health issues he can no longer use oil paint — and she paints over the image, creating works that reflect both media.
“You can’t go in a single day and do what we do. … It can’t be done in one sitting. It has to be done over a period of time,” Wojtkiewicz said. “It has to unfold.”
That contrasts with other techniques, such as plein air painting where the artist creates a painting in one session while working outside.
Painter Aaron Pickens is represented in the show by a painting of carefully arranged toys that remind him of the joy that got him into art. That painting “In Da Club” won Best of Show at the 2018 NowOH exhibit. He also does plein air landscapes, one of which won best of show at the 2017 NowOH exhibit.
Briggs said: “I’ve just always had that tendency to realist approach to painting.” He attended an undergraduate program that was “rigorously traditional almost to a fault.”
He didn’t even use photographs as the basis for paintings into he was well into his 20s.
A fellow artist recommended he apply to BGSU for graduate school, calling it “a diamond in the rough.”
He was drawn to the program about a decade ago not just by the realism of Wojtkiewicz and Charles Kanwischer, who teaches drawing and is now director of the school, but also by painter Mille Guldbeck.
He sees a resurgence in interest in figurative painting, especially that inspired by social realism of the 1930s and 1940s and the public murals of Thomas Benton Hart and Diego Rivera.
Neither he nor Wojtkiewicz believe the focus on realism draws undergraduate students to the university, though it may attract some graduate students.
Many undergraduates only find their way to the painting and drawing after they’ve come to the school. They may be enrolled in digital art and graphic design — disciplines that seem more practical to parents — and then discover their love for painting.
“I’m not trying to turn out little Dennises,” Wojtkiewicz said. “We’re looking for students to find their own way and to help them find their own way.”
They may be influenced as much by their peers and faculty in other departments as by their art professors, he said.
Having the traveling exhibit is an attempt to help students find their way to BGSU.
That “On Being” features so many graduates “does build a certain awareness,” Wojtkiewicz said. “I’m rather proud of the fact that so many talented people came out of the program, and all of them are doing well.”
