“UNTITLED,” CONTE ON PAPER BY AUDREY CLEMO.
As a final project life drawing students of the Tacoma School of the Arts (SOTA) were assigned to do a portrait of Michele Savage, one of their instructors who happens to be in an advanced stage of pregnancy. With this common subject as a point of departure, the SOTA students went to work in all manner of drawing media. Some used pencil while others used ink. Watercolor, colored marker, sharpie, white charcoal and conte crayon were also used by the young artists.
The results of this assignment are now on view at University of Washington-Tacoma’s Iron Gallery. The 15 works on paper have been matted and set on easels within the gallery space. While the drawings in the exhibit are unified by their common subject matter, the variety of ways in which individual students chose to depict their pregnant teacher make for an interesting comparison.
Riley Simpson shows the instructor simply seated on a bench beside an abstract painting. A number of students, however, chose to introduce fantastical elements into their depictions. Kenji Stoll, for example, places the figure at the center of a nimbus of solar beams. Jovita Austin sets the figure in a somewhat gothic interior while Rebecca Mantyla, Alex Hanssen and Asia Tail have the teacher floating like the fetus in her womb. Samantha Bates, Brandy Sincyr and Hannah Thompson, meanwhile, set Savage amid landscapes. Thompson, using watercolor, gives the pregnant teacher a crown and sets her on a throne in the wilderness. Emily Meyers puts the instructor in a fanciful costume and sets her in a wonderful forest populated by vines and trees that bear breast-like fruits. In a like manner, Audrey Clemo’s sumptuous drawing in conte crayon shows the instructor seated on a vine-swing dangling in the branches of an orange-leafed tree. Chelsey Garrett makes the instructor a piece on a surreal chessboard where the pawns have baby faces.
In a number of the drawings the child-yet-to-be has been externalized. Shannon Lopez drew a huge baby cradling the pregnant mother-to-be. Christie Tirado’s well-executed pen drawing shows the mother and child facing one another and bound together by a rope-like umbilical chord that loops around them. Rea Lankford is deft at handling ink washes and utilizing interesting cropping to depict the pregnant teacher with the fetus shown within her round belly. A boy (the child in the future?) is seen in the background.
The show runs through Feb. 17 at the gallery located at 1742 Pacific Ave. (enter at Hot Rod Dog). For further information contact (253) 692-5753.
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