Current Season

Susan Fecho: Landscapes of Convergence

Gerard Lange: Pictura Poesis

Horace Farlowe: Barton Egg Boat

Barton Fall Student Exhibition

Samll Works

29th Anual Scholastic Art Awards Exhibition

Mark Hewitt: Ceramics

Marcus Hamilton: Illustration

Intercollegiate Film Festival

Barton Senior Art Exhibition 2007

Susan Fecho: Landscapes of Convergence

August 28-October 6
Opening reception, September 7, 6-8 p.m.

Through her work, Susan Fecho presents the familiar in unfamiliar configurations. "A new sense of significance is imparted to an otherwise everyday object," she said. "The effect is a layered, multifaceted, tactile surface that seeks an emotional response in the viewer."

During a recent semester-long sabbatical from Barton College, she visited two artist residencies in rural areas: the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Science in Rabun Gap, Ga., and Pouch Cove Foundation's Residential Arts Program in Newfoundland.

Fecho described these residencies as wonderful environments that supported creative interaction and where writers, musicians and visual artists shared time together, discussing how they problem solved and how they approached studio work.

Fecho sees her art as an eclectic fusion of digital and fine art, influenced by globalization, liberalization and consumer technology. She intentionally seeks relationships between the variables, and a voice among the silent opinions.

Writing also serves as a catalyst for Fecho's work, which is almost always how her visual art begins. A poem, a discarded letter, a random note, or an excerpt from a book could provide the inspiration she seeks for drawing or painting.

The viewer will notice that Fecho subtly integrates text into her design creating yet another dimension to be considered. She is always searching for that vernacular writing to provide inspiration for her work.

From the rural areas of America's Deep South to the most northeastern point of the North American continent, Fecho made rubbings from trees, roots and rocks with graphite sticks and rice paper to create the foundation of her work. From there, she allowed paint, pastels, pencil and digital technology to converge on her canvas as she brought attention to that which is so easily overlooked.

The richness of seasonal hues in her work move from the cold grays and bitter browns of winter to the vibrant greens and yellows, the cool blues and warm reds of early spring.

Fecho's works seduce the viewer beyond the boundaries of the canvas to the remote places of nature, rural life and even urban sprawl. These details spawn stories for the viewer's imagination and capture life in its most abandoned corners.

"My recent work investigates the sensory experience of travel," she said. "How will the memory express a particular area's geographic assemblage of forms and boundaries? The human body, architectural unit, and surrounding landscape become metaphors. I search for a sense of place, for integration, as I connect imagery together into a conjured representation of reality."

Gerard Lange: Pictura Poesis

October 15-December 5
Opening reception, October 15, 2-4 p.m.

"Pictura Poesis" is an exhibition of photographs by Gerard Lange.

Lange said that he never intended to become a maker of traditional images but entered the medium to use it as an interpretive process. "To say interpretative, I mean that my approach in photography is not one where I accept the medium's inherent qualities but depart from those qualities denying the accepted nature," Lange said.

Most often, his examination involves the way a camera interprets light. Many of his images are derived from hand-built or primitive cameras.

"As I begin to make exposures, my hope is to learn to see the way the camera does," Lange said. "Since different cameras produce different pictorial qualities, they tend to become suited for different kinds of subjects or themes." Much of Lange's work deals with the theme of imperfect memory. The soft, out-of-focus images are visual manifestations of how his mind "sees" images from his own past.

Strikingly different from the soft subtle images in the exhibition are the sharply focused images of produce. For this project, Lange wanted to interpret the photocopier as a means of making photographs. "Experiments using a Xerox as a means to capture an image led me to use a digital flatbed scanner as a camera," continued Lange. "For these photographs, actual three-dimensional items were placed on the scan-bed and captured at extremely high resolution."

The act of acceptance and denial is a key proponent in Lange's process. Regardless of whether he is building a camera or lens, using a device's controls properly or incorrectly, or stretching the nature of what a photograph is by definition, he is always on a quest to capture beauty in the image. "I enjoy all manners of photography, but I personally enjoy creating images that are not totally discernable and must involve some personal interaction and interpretation," he said.

The title of the exhibition comes from the Latin phrase, "ut pictura poesis," meaning "as is painting so is poetry." This phrase is most often associated with Horace's treatise on poetics. It is said that Horace felt that poetry in its broadest sense of "imaginative texts" deserved the same level of respect and interpretation that was afforded and often reserved for painting.

Lange added that there is a delicate harmony that can be created in an image much like that which can be crafted in a poem. "My choice of title for the exhibition is symbolic of photography's struggle to be accepted in the world of fine/high art and is also symbolic of my imperfect photographs being accepted in the world of traditional photography."

Horace Farlowe: Barton Egg Boat

October 15-December 5
Opening reception, October 15, 2-4 p.m.

"The Barton Egg Boat Exhibition" will features the bronze sculpture created especially for Barton College by the late Horace Farlowe, an internationally renowned sculptor and alumnus of the college. Just prior to his death, Farlowe released this limited edition sculpture in support of the arts at his alma mater.

Limited to 100 pieces, this 11.75 X 3.75 X 3.75-inch solid bronze egg boat at $1,500 offers collectors a rare piece of Farlowe's work. Each egg boat is signed in the mold and hand numbered. The proceeds will support an endowment Farlowe established for the teaching of sculpture at Barton. Interested collectors may contact Carolyn Brown in the Barton College Office of Institutional Advancement at 1-800-422-4699 or email: chbrown@barton.edu.

Farlowe graduated from Barton College in 1963 with a bachelor of science degree in painting and continued his studies at East Carolina University where he completed a master of arts degree in sculpture. Prior to his art degrees, Farlowe pursued architectural studies at North Carolina State University. Farlowe served as head of sculpture at the University of Georgia in Athens.

Lauded internationally for his talents in the area of sculpture, Farlowe was one of four artists selected for the International Granite Carving Symposium at Lumsden, Scotland, during the Scottish Sculpture Workshop. He was involved with the Oliver Strebelle video project in Brussels, Belgium, as well as the video project on contemporary stone carvers of Zimbabwe, Africa. He also traveled to Carrara and Cortona, Italy, as a result of his sculpting expertise.

Farlowe's work has been viewed in over 100 exhibitions across the United States and abroad. His works are recognized in over 28 permanent collections, including the Scottish Arts Council, Scotland; North Carolina Zoological Park, Asheboro; Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; R.J. Reynolds Industries, Inc., Winston-Salem; University of Arkansas, Little Rock; Mitchell Company, Houston, Texas; the Albany Museum of Art, Albany, Ga.; and the Complex Esportiu Municipal, Barcelona, Spain, among others.

The "Lost Wax" process, the same used to create the Barton Egg Boat, has been captured on 10 photographic panels by Keith Tew. This 10-step process chronicles the work of artist Jodi Hollnagel-Jubran.

Barton Fall Student Exhibition

Small Works

December 6, 3-7 p.m.

Members of the Barton Art Students League, armed with paint brushes, glitter glue and lots of creativity set up shop in the middle of the school cafeteria. Senior art major Brittany Dickey, president of the Art Students' League at Barton, said the group wanted to introduce Barton students to more art."What better way to do it than put it in the middle of things?" she said.

This project was on a small scale. Students - some who are art majors, some who are not - created postcards on 4X6-inch paper. The works of were displayed in the Virginia Thompson Graves Gallery of the Barton Museum and sold for $1 each.

The project is a fund-raiser for the Art Students' League to furnish the student lounge in the art building.

Assistant professor of art and photography Gerard Lange brought the fund-raiser idea before the students. Lange, who's new to Barton, has seen versions of the project done successfully at North Michigan University and the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans. In fact, in other places college alumni have paid well more than $1 for a piece of art to support the project, he said.

29th Anual Scholastic Art Awards Exhibition

The 29th annual Eastern/Central North Carolina Region Scholastic Art Awards recognized 207 Gold Key winners, eight of whom became eligible for academic scholarships to art colleges.

Although the middle school and high school students may be at the beginning of their journeys into art, the keynote speaker at the awards ceremony took time to encourage the artists to continue honing their craft.

Marcus Hamilton, an illustrator and a 1965 graduate of Atlantic Christian, now Barton, College advised the young artists to be prepared and to persevere in his keynote speach.

Hamilton explained he has done both of those things in his years as an artist. He took over the "Dennis the Menace" comic strip from Hank Ketcham in 1995 and earned the Reuben Award - described as the Oscar of the cartooning world - in 2005.

A panel of jurors, composed of art educators and curators from around the state, evaluated more than 2,000 entries and selected 207 Gold Key finalists.

"The judges have very high standards when they're evaluating the work," Barton Professor Mark Gordon said Sunday. "They were impressed by the high quality in general."

First-time participant Meredith Banta, a senior at West Forsyth High School, won two Gold Keys for her pieces - a digital imagery photo of a flower, and a self-portrait done in mixed media. She used flesh-toned cut-outs from magazines to create an image of her face.

"It took me three or four weeks to do the mixed media. I did it on a piece of glass so I had to do it backwards," Banta said.

Another attention-grabber at the exhibit was a large airbrushed photo of a black woman's face, with a faint trace of a peace symbol visible in her hair. Southern Nash High School sophomore Ian Martinez completed the piece in just a few days, he said.

"This was my first submission. I drew it out, then airbrushed it. It didn't take too long," Martinez said. "I've done artwork for five or six years. I was happy to hear I won an award."Among the Silver Key recipients were two students from Wilson - Ashley Warren of Forest Hills Middle School for "Freaky Face," and Katie Bass of Springfield Middle School for "Wedding Flowers."

Mark Hewitt: Ceramics

The Barton College Friends of Visual Arts brings internationally acclaimed potter Mark Hewitt to the Barton campus for an exhibition of his work.

Born in Stoke-on-Trent, England, Hewitt is the son and grandson of directors of Spode, the fine china manufacturers. As a student at Bristol University in the early 1970s, he read Bernard Leach's "A Potter's Book," and he decided to become a studio potter rather than an industrial manager. This decision led Hewitt to a three-year apprenticeship with Michael Cardew, and later another with Todd Piker in Connecticut, where Hewitt met his wife, Carol.

In 1983, the Hewitts moved to Pittsboro and set up their pottery. Hewitt built a very large wood kiln and began making the distinctive functional pots for which he is known, specializing in very large planters and jars, along with finely made smaller items.

Known for using local clays and blending the different North Carolinian folk traditions together into a contemporary style, Hewitt has attracted a sizeable following. He actually mines and refines the local stoneware clays, and his principal glazes are the traditional Southern alkaline glaze and salt glaze.

All his work is fired in a big wood burning kiln the size of a school bus, which he fires three times a year.

Hewitt's work has been featured in the Smithsonian Magazine and on the cover of America Craft magazine. He has written extensively in the ceramic press and has exhibited in London, New York, and Tokyo, as well as throughout the United States.

Hewitt is well represented in museum and private collections including the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institution and the National Arboretum in Washington, D.C.; the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis, Minn.; the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Va.; the Mint Museum in Charlotte; and the Ackland Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Marcus Hamilton: Illustration

The newly established Friends of Visual Arts organization at Barton College welcomes illustrator and cartoonist Marcus Hamilton for an exhibition of his work.

Back by popular demand for this late winter show, Hamilton is making a second visit to Wilson and Barton College this semester. He received a standing ovation following remarks he made to a crowd of 400 at the recent National Scholastic Art Awards ceremony for the Eastern /Central North Carolina Region in January on the Barton campus.

Hamilton returns to share his story and his work with the Wilson and Barton campus communities. His story begins with an early love for drawing that evolved into a career as a freelance illustrator for a number of national publications including The Saturday Evening Post, Golf Digest, U.S. News & World Report and Changing Times magazines, among others.

Becoming disenchanted with commercial art when the evolution of computer graphic arts began to replace the painstaking hand-drawn work, he realized some significant changes in his life. Through a series of serendipitous events, Hamilton discovered that Hank Ketcham, creator of the "Dennis the Menace" comic strip, was interested in retiring, and he contacted this patriarch of the comic panel. Impressed with the work Hamilton sent to him, Ketcham decided to offer him the opportunity to learn the intricacies of drawing his beloved "Dennis." And, after an extended apprenticeship, Ketcham handed over the daily "Dennis" comic strip to Hamilton in October 1995.

Hamilton's career has had its highs and lows over the years, but he says that preparedness and perseverance have carried him through the difficult periods. In 2005, Hamilton was presented the prestigious Reuben Award, often referred to as the Oscar of the cartooning world.

Intercollegiate Film Festival

March 2007
Competition Screenings, March 30, 31

Barton College’s first film festival has occurred in two parts: the Women’s Film Series and the Intercollegiate Competition.

Throughout March, the college has been screening independent films in celebration of Women’s History Month. The issues in the films have included the struggles of mixed-religion marriage, homosexuality and religion, gender in athletic competitions and women in the workplace.

The finale of the festival was the screening of student-made films submitted for the Intercollegiate Competition. This was open to students of colleges and universities in North Carolina and South Carolina with five categories: animation, abstract/experimental, documentary, fiction and satire.

The intention of the film festival, presented by the Art Students League, was to attract work of student filmmakers from throughout the region to present to the Barton and Wilson communities. There will be six films shown Saturday representing student projects from Barton College, Elon University, N.C. State University and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

The screenings were followed by an awards ceremony. Winners of the various categories were presented with $100 prizes. The jurors’ choice for best-in-show received $200. The awards were made possible through funding provided by the Student Government Association of Barton College.

Having been open primarily to students, this competition fills a certain niche in the world of independent film as there is not a festival in this region specifically devoted to student work, said Emily D. Edwards, professor of broadcasting and cinema at UNC-G and one of the jurors of the Barton festival.

The winner of the documentary category and jurors’ choice award was “In the Midst of a Moment” by Ryan Howard and Laura Nicotra, of Elon University. This film chronicles the stories of several individuals and their plight to end segregation in the South. Filmed at a conference last October, the film was shown on UNC-TV in February in celebration of Black History Month. Two men shown in the documentary are writer Karl Fleming, who tells his story of being beaten on the street during the Watts Riots in Los Angeles, Calif., in 1965, and Horace Carter, whose family was threatened by the Ku Klux Klan. The film received an Award of Excellence in the Broadcast Education Awards 2007 Competition.

Bret Bengtson, a sophomore at N.C. State University, won the animation category with his short “Improvisation.” Although less than two minutes long, this film contains more than 3,000 individual frames, each created separately, using only the previous frame as the context for the creation of the next frame. Producing sequential imagery in this manner disregards what may have been on screen 50 or 100 frames previously and denies any sense of directed plot. Bengtson says this way of working is, “much like a jazz musician who improvises based on interaction with the other musicians.”

Equally as interesting and unusual was the abstract/ experimental winner “Dreams” by recent Barton graduate Joshua S. Davis. This film described by Davis as a visual poem, is about the contrasts in life of good and evil, light and dark. “I wanted to create something that would cause someone to experience something deep and emotional,” Davis said. As dramatic momentum builds in the film, the imagery ends suddenly invoking a sense of released tension akin to having to take a deep breath.

Davis also has two other films in the competition: “Queen of the Dance” which won for best fiction and “Barton Art ’06 Senior Exhibition,” a documentary about Barton students preparing artwork for their final exhibitions as art majors. “Queen of the Dance” is about a dramatic love triangle involving three college students. The story, written by Webster Struthers, who is a professor in the communications department at Barton, was filmed as a musical. Davis exercises some creative liberties with his filmmaking style in which he contrasts avant guarde with a soap opera type treatment. This contrast is used to create a bridge between the musical and non-musical sequences.

In addition to these prize-winning films, there was a special screening of “Spaces” by Kristen Larson of UNC-G. Larson, who was a dance master of fine arts student, was killed in a car accident last fall. Edwards finished the film for Larson. “Spaces” was the capstone film for this year’s festival, tying together the Women’s Series and Intercollegiate Competition.

Barton Senior Art Exhibition 2007

April 14-May 9
Opening reception, April 14, 7-9 p.m.

This year's Senior Art Exhibition will showcase the work of seniors Brittany Dickey, Bea Barrozo, Gregory Beaver and Rachel Gilliam.

"These graduating art students are on the threshold of post-graduate careers," said Mark Gordon, associate professor of art and senior class adviser. "This exhibition provides these seniors with a wonderful opportunity to display the culminating product of their energy and creativity and to showcase their emerging professionalism. As their college careers at Barton rapidly come to a close, I have been impressed with their motivation, attention to detail and high standards."

Brittany Dickey of El Paso, Texas, plans to graduate in December with a bachelor of fine arts degree in studio art with a concentration in photography. Her work focuses on the everyday objects that surround our lives. Her tight compositions draw the viewer in and force them to take notice of these objects we have come ignore but can't live without. Lately, Dickey has been drawing the viewer into the subtle changes in the eyes through emotion and age.

Bea Xenia Barrozo of South Bend, Ind., plans to graduate in May with a bachelor of fine arts degree in studio art with a concentration in graphic design. During this exhibition, her work will be a collaboration of photography and graphics, using the Adobe CS programs to create various pieces that not only show technical skill but also her knowledge in design and composition. Two themes of her work to be showcased include saving and caring for the planet as well as the concern for youth who will be affected by the current living habits of the world's population.

Gregory Beaver of Zebulon plans to graduate in May with a bachelor of fine arts degree in studio art with a concentration in photography. In addition to traditional fine art photography, Beaver also enjoys exploring the use of digital manipulation and alternative processes for further evolution of the photographic medium. Upon graduation from Barton, Beaver hopes to attend graduate school to continue his studies and further develop his talent as an artist.

Rachel Gilliam of Old Fort also plans to graduate in May with a bachelor of fine arts degree in studio art with a concentration in photography and graphic design and a minor in mass communications. Her work creates an interface between photography and sculpture, with a central theme that all things created from nature will eventually return to their original state.