The latest installation of student art Dimensions 2: Work from classes in Drawing, Painting, Printmaking opened this past week in Spingold Theater Center’s Dreitzer Gallery. Open until Feb. 6, the show consists of student works from the Fall 2014 semester from the Beginning and Intermediate Painting, Beginning and Intermediate Drawing and Printmaking classes.

Stepping into the exhibition, the sheer volume of artwork and variety of mediums and styles is overwhelming. Designated walls and alcoves separate the works by class level and styles.

On a wall for Intermediate Drawing are two rows of paper-sized monochromatic collages. In these works, the artists used only shades of black and white to create self-portraits. However, Yingnan Guo ’15 said that it is not intended for the viewer to be able to recognize the artists’ physical features in the portraits. Rather, the abstract shapes are meant to convey what the artists feel are representative of themselves. The artists spent time painting the different varieties of gray and cutting out the shapes that they would use to define themselves before constructing the collages.

A square cluster of medium-sized pieces holds a collection of still-life works from the Beginning Painting class. In these pieces, gourds and wine bottles in front of a mirror are depicted from various angles. The painters were given the tricky task of capturing the reflection of the gourds and creating the contrast between the reflections and the objects themselves. A restriction for these paintings was that the painters could only use four colors: black, yellow ochre, venetian red and white. Olivia Joy ’18 said that the artists were also not allowed to add white to their canvases until they made substantial progress into their work. This greatly increased the challenge of creating these paintings because of the particularly dark, earthy quality of the yellow ochre and venetian red paints.

Another cluster of smaller paintings from the Beginning Painting class is tightly packed together, almost forming one larger mural. The busy paintings focus on the Brandeis campus. Some paintings are packed with vibrant color while others are more muted. For these paintings, the artists ventured out to paint specific scenes, such as the astronomy dome, Fellows Garden, rocks outside the art studio and other nature scenes on campus centering especially on trees. Joy said that one of these “sketches,” as they were called, was particularly challenging to paint because the normal use of a brush was not allowed. Rather, “we had to paint the campus using only our palette knives, no brushes allowed, and the palette knife is a metal tool that sort of looks like a pie slicer that you are really supposed to use to mix your paint. We had to apply the paint using only that tool,” she explained in an interview with the Justice.

Painting outdoor landscapes was a common theme of the gallery. For one set of works, the artists painted large, vividly detailed landscapes focusing on foliage and campus views. Afterward, they painted smaller portraits of themselves in front of that same landscape. Prof. Susan Lichtman (FA) who teaches a “Beginning Painting” course commented on the project in an interview with the Justice. “This is a tradition in self portraiture of artists,” she said. “Often if you look at self-portraits, you will see maybe what looks like a window behind them, but actually it’s the painting that the artist has already done. It makes an interesting backdrop, rather than just having a blank wall or the studio behind them.”

Other notable pieces include an enormous work from the Intermediate Drawing students that depicts a surreal scene of octopus tentacles encircling a woman and child. Drawn in only black and white, the shading and 3D depth given to the piece is astonishing. An Intermediate Painting of a skull intertwined with the landscape highlights a common theme of combining things viewed at different times to make a more complicated subject.

Dimensions 2 is a strong demonstration of the artistic talent at Brandeis in drawing, painting, and printmaking. Be sure to also check out the next Dreitzer Gallery Opening, Dimensions 3: Work from the classes in Sculpture and Photography.