This week’s featured artwork – a painting of Dirk Liechty on canvas in oil – was created by Annali Smucker, a junior art major. She crafted the painting as part of the Advanced Painting class held in the Union gymnasium last fall. Smucker explored with skin tone and bone structure of the human body. “We had to create multiple skin tone colors on our palette before we even begun painting,” Smucker said. “There are many layers on this painting, but oil paint is slow drying and each layer has to dry in between session to work. It took a number...

By Ben Noll • February 4, 2009 • Arts

This week’s Artist’s Corner is a graphic design from Abi Tsigie, a first-year. He created “Vexation of Spirit” for a scholarship competition run by Shalom Mennonite Church that encouraged students to think creatively about their role as peacemakers. The winged figure that dominates the design is actually the outline of Tsigie’s own body but represents any individual. The piece is filled with symbolism, including the image of Africa on the wings which represents Tsigie’s African heritage and conveys group belonging. The barbed wire symbolizes how an individual can be held down from helping the world and the surrounding words –...

By Admin • January 28, 2009 • Arts

With bold prints, current Hershberger Gallery artist Hung Liu questions history, issues around feminism, Chinese politics and the universe. Born in 1948 in Changchun, China during the time of the communist Mao Zedong regime, Hung was sent to work in the rice fields for four years as a high school senior. Ordered to paint art glorifying the Mao regime, Hung found a correlation between the hopeless faces of present-day Chinese women workers and the old photographs of past Emperors and their wives, inserting challenging references in the propaganda she painted. Hung studied art and earned her bachelor’s of fine arts...

By Andrea Kraybill • January 28, 2009 • Arts

This week’s featured artwork is “Hope” by Edgar Diaz, a senior business major. Diaz produced this drawing in John Blosser’s Drawing 101 class this past fall semester. It was the first drawing course he had ever taken. Diaz’s inspiration for the piece came from an elderly homeless woman at the South Bend Center for the Homeless, an organization he has connected with through his work with “DanceSport … on the plaza,” a ballroom dancing studio in Mishawaka. According to Diaz, “When asked what she wanted for Christmas, [she] asked for love, happiness and peace. I decided to give her the...

By Admin • January 21, 2009 • Arts

Kristi Glick, a 1997 Goshen College graduate, and Anne Binder, a local artist, combine artistic work and vision in a two-part exhibit currently on display in the Hershberger Art Gallery, located in the Goshen College Music Center. The exhibit opened in November and will continue through Jan. 18. Glick and Binder will give their Topics and Issues talk on Sunday, Jan. 18, at 1:30 p.m. in the gallery and will discuss their work in the process of creating. According to Judy Wenig-Horswell, associate professor of art, Glick, a former student, was actually an interdisciplinary major with a concentration in art,...

By Elizabeth Beachy • January 14, 2009 • Arts

This week’s featured artist is Chet Franklin, a senior art and American Sign Language double major. His piece, “Connection,” was created as part of John Blosser’s Drawing 101 class this past fall semester. Chet stuck to a black-and-white color palette for this work using inkwash on masonite with newspaper, gesso and string. Franklin said, “I chose to use strictly black and white imagery so that I could connect the drawn images to the newspaper print, as well as to simplify the image as a whole.” Franklin also said that the “simplicity of color correlates to the simplicity of human connection,...

By Admin • January 14, 2009 • Arts