The once-blank walls of the LaVerne Krause Gallery were splashed with creativity, color and the unique artwork of five University students Monday.
For most of the students, it was their first art exhibition and filling the white walls was a daunting task. After an exhausting night, the students proudly displayed the fruits of years of labor to the public when the gallery opened at 10 a.m. Monday.
Last spring, the five friends petitioned to put their work up in the LaVerne Krause Gallery, where it will stay until Friday at 3 p.m.
“It feels like the culmination of three or four years of work. To finally have it in a gallery setting is really fulfilling,” Dane Eisenbart said, wearing a proud smile.
Eisenbart’s oil paintings are vibrantly colored with multi-dimensional additions, such as snails and hands of the clock reaching out from the canvases. His major sources of inspiration are Salvador Dali, Vladimir Kusch, the book “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” natural elements and his mother.
One corner of the gallery is filled with Eisenbart’s tiny canvases, which are covered with psychedelic snails. The snail bodies are made of polymer clay with real shells from sea snails and forest snails he collected in the Eugene area. To Eisenbart, the snails reflect the perfect beauty of nature and the finitude of life.
“The spiral of a shell grows outward similar to the rings of a tree to create a timeline of sorts. But of course, eventually the spiral has to stop,” he said.
Erica Knutson’s art showcases her use of several different mediums. For some pieces she uses acrylic paint on canvas, cardboard, paper or wood. Others are screen-printed or woven from wool and she often combines mixed media into one piece.
Like Eisenbart, Knutson uses nature as a recurring theme. Knutson has added real bees, butterflies, dragonflies and even the dried body of a frog to her paintings. After an exhausting night she smiled, seeing the early crowd in the gallery Monday morning.
“It’s nice seeing all of our work in one space. I think all of our styles work really well together.”
Adam Bergman spent Sunday night putting the finishing brushstrokes on his painting “Frozen Popcorn (Scope Elobe),” so he didn’t finish hanging the painting until 15 minutes after the opening.
“One of the biggest problems in art is making people stop and think about it,” Bergman said. Therefore he inserts the words of his favorite philosopher into his paintings. After Bergman read Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil,” he pulled out his favorite words from the text in random order and compiled them onto a canvas in a piece called “Aufhebung.”
Scott Cooper showcased his drawings, prints, and his copper etchings. Picasso and van Gogh are his main influences, something that is apparent in the skewed male faces that he has been drawing ever since he was young.
“It’s natural for me when I sit down with a blank piece of paper to draw gloomy, distorted faces,” he said.
Exquisite ink lines and attention to detail characterize his work, which can also be seen hanging at Espresso Roma on 13th Avenue.
One of the most controversial pieces in the gallery is by Andrew Birk and is titled “New Millennium Religious Icons.” It depicts a crucified figure that Birk explained represents the war in Iraq. Over the left shoulder looms a satanic face smoking a cigarette with the letters U.S. on it. Floating over the right shoulder is the face of an army general with a smudged-out mouth.
“This figure is Bush with his mouth blurred because he’s voiceless, obviously,” Birk said. “I was really pissed off with the state of what was going on in the world,” he said about his motivation behind the piece.
The LaVerne Krause Gallery, which is open Monday through Thursday until 6 p.m. and Friday until 3 p.m., is located in Lawrence Hall. It offers an opportunity for students to showcase their artwork to the rest of the student body and faculty and to receive feedback on their work. The artists will host a public reception in the gallery on Thursday from 5 to 7 p.m.