Each week during winter term, the LaVerne Krause Art Gallery in Lawrence Hall displays the artwork of three undergraduate students. Art majors Torin Stephens, Daniel Waroff and Shannon Sullivan are featured this week.
Student artists who want to be featured must complete a rigorous application process, and all artists featured in a given exhibit must display complementary work.
“Dan and Torin applied together and I applied on my own,” Sullivan said. While their pieces collaborate well, each student has an individual style.
Stephens, 24, enjoys painting with acrylic on canvas, although his other mediums of choice include ink and spray paint.
“I’m just a fast, dirty, angry painter,” Stephens said. He likes to use a “combination of human figures with contrasting abstract landscapes … using bold, loud colors.”
Stephens’ paintings require anywhere from 15 to 30 hours of preparation and actual painting time, but he said he does very little preliminary sketching.
A Portland native, Stephens has attended the University since 2005. He is a photography major and has been “seriously involved in photography since the age of 16.” However, painting has become his passion in the past two-and-a-half years.
While some of Waroff’s and Sullivan’s pieces were created in classes, Stephens’ pieces were not.
Stephens has also studied glassblowing, printmaking and drawing, and in 2004, he did a three-and-a-half-month photography internship documenting the efforts of Buddhist monks involved in environmentalism in Thailand.
Stephens hopes to graduate in the spring, after which he plans to return to Portland and continue his art.
“Hopefully people like it and will decide they should give me more than coffee change to own it for themselves,” he said. “I also intend on going back to graduate school for art in a couple of years after taking a breather from academia.”
Waroff, 25, prefers to use oil paint on canvas. A dedicated painter since the age of 14, Waroff said he would like to continue his work as an artist and perhaps become a teacher someday.
In his display, Waroff focuses on figures that “capture the psychological frustration … (through) environments that are not literal but internal and psychological.” Though Stephens uses bold backgrounds in his paintings, Waroff is “not a fan of backgrounds” and feels there is no need for them.
Also displaying her work at the gallery is Sullivan, 21, who does not yet have a specialty but wants to explore her options as an artist. She used a variety of mediums for her pieces, including acrylic on canvas, oil on silk and charcoal on canvas.
Excited about her first exhibition, Sullivan said she would “love to continue to develop her art and hopefully not get stuck in the place where (she is) now.”
Sullivan would also like to concentrate on figure drawing. Sullivan said she began painting at a very young age but only became serious at 17 years old.
“I first remember wanting to be an artist professionally when I saw Alan Lee’s watercolor illustrations of the Lord of the Rings,” she said. “However, I liked to draw well before then.”
Sullivan has also experimented with Chinese brush paint, raku pottery, batik and watercolor. These days, she regularly experiments with oils, which she began using upon her arrival at the University.
“I decided to become an art major despite my misgivings of it being a wise decision in terms of career choice,” she said, referring to possible financial instability. “As I’ve progressed within the program, I’ve tried to devote more and more of my time to painting.”
Sullivan plans to apply for a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with a focus in painting, as she aspires to be an artist. She looks forward to future exhibitions and would like to do “a series of figure drawings. Bodies in motion especially interest me.”
The exhibit will be on display through Friday.
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