The University of West Florida’s TAG Gallery is showcasing work from introductory level classes. The current show provides students who may not previously displayed their work with a formal gallery experience.
“Points of Departure” features works produced by students in foundation level drawing, photography, painting and graphic design courses. Yvonne Lebrun is a junior in the BFA program. She has paintings, drawings and photographs on display in the show.
“One of them is a palette knife painting, which you use the paints a la prima, so there’s no oil and it’s straight out of the tube and it’s really thick and goopy. You use your palette knife instead of a paintbrush, and so you’re moving the paint across the canvas a lot. For me, it went a lot more fluid than with a brush," Lebrun said.
Lebrun began with digital photography. At UWF, she and other photography students learn the darkroom process and shoot on film. She aspires to enter a Master’s program.
“You’re like, I think I know what I want to do. Then you take these fundamental courses that expose you to different mediums. And then you’re like, oh well, I thought I was a photographer, but you know what, I might be a sculpture person, or I might be a graphic designer, I don’t know. You’re exposed, then you kind of get this taste for it," Lebrun said.
After students complete the fundamental courses, they select a specialty. Colleen Jennings is a senior at UWF. She was recently accepted into the BFA program and will be studying digital art next semester.
“It’s a really diverse program they actually have employed, ‘cause I have a couple classes where I’m learning electronics and javascript and how to program. It’s a lot of stuff that you wouldn’t think would have to do with design, but it actually comes in handy a lot when you’re designing other things," said Jennings.
Her work was recently featured in a digital arts show held at the UWF library. She has charcoal figure drawings and work she created for her principles of graphic design class in the TAG show. One of them is a travel poster to an imaginary place.
“A lot of people in the class did Neverland, Wonderland, stuff that we read in books," Jennings said. “I did Arrakis from Dune, which is something I’m into. We basically were learning how to layer things and how to make it look like it was something you wanted to travel into and be a part of, though Arrakis is like a desert planet, you still wanted to go in and see it."
One of the graphic design students with work in the show is junior Laszlo Barr. He produced a copy of a work by German Renaissance printmaker and painter Albrecht Durer and an optical illusion drawing of a water bottle inside of a water bottle.
“I’m looking through a microscope, so it’s very zoomed in to the bottom of the bottle," Barr said. "You get the reflection of the plastic and then the shininess from the water and the different looks inside of it. Yeah, it’s very hard to look into. " Barr wants to to try sculpture and ceramics before deciding on a specialization. He found his introductory-level classes beneficial.
““It’s been a while since I worked with ink, things that I did in that class, working with white compressed charcoal. I haven’t worked with those things in a while, it’s really messy, too. But it was fun, I learned a lot from it. I’m still learning through them, like I still have my packets from those classes and the assignments that we worked on," said Barr.
The Points of Departure show is free and open to the public and will be on display in the TAG Gallery through November 27. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday from 10am to 4pm and Saturday from 12 to 4pm.