For the safety of our students, visitors, and staff, Creative Arts Workshop is closed until further notice. Although the Faculty Spotlight can’t be viewed in person, we invite you to click through this online gallery of Lisa Hess Hesselgrave’s work:
February 2020 – April 2020
Lisa Hess Hesselgrave, Drawing + Painting Department
Lisa Hess Hesselgrave is a Drawing + Painting Department faculty member at CAW. For more, visit www.lisahesselgrave.com
On display are selections from the series Beauty:
My work shifts between several themes: the atmospheric landscape; the figure as an abstraction of form and color; and the narrative that occurs when the painted figure enters the painted place.
Mostly wooded and often dark, my figures and the places they inhabit come from a combination of perception, memory and imagination. Exploring the theme of a
woman living in the wilderness has led to a body of work I’ve called “Into the Wild” and includes a series of work imagining “Beauty” and her “beast.”
Reflecting upon civilization, survival, and humankind’s continually evolving relationship to nature, Beauty represents a capable woman in a sustainable, natural world, observing, confronting and taming the source of her fear.
December 2019 – February 2020
Phyllis Crowley, Photography Department
Phyllis Crowley is a Photography Department faculty member at CAW, and formerly taught at Norwalk Community College and the University of Bridgeport. She exhibits nationally, and her work is in corporate, institutional, and private collections. For more, visit www.phylliscrowley.com
On display are selections from the series Off Peak:
From the moving train, fleeting images of the landscape are perceived and held for a fraction of a second and then dissolve into memory. The train window, usually experienced as transparent, creates an interface between the passenger and the landscape. By changing the focus to the window as an important part of the scene, rather than a barrier, the camera transforms the subject.
Clear outlines dissolve into abstract forms, sides of buildings become washes of color; grass and trees turn into brushstrokes, and the lens records the marks and stains on the window as impartially as what lies beyond. The camera creates an imperfect memory image.
There is a reference here to our inability to know anything clearly or directly; all our information is filtered by various interfaces.
The work is personal, intimate, experiential, with much left to chance. Nothing can be planned; decisions have to be made in an instant. Every picture represents, Wow!—Yes!—Click. After many such clicks, patterns emerge which help the photographer anticipate certain effects.
Different cameras have been used, from professional to cell.
As the work has progressed over 13 years, it has become more abstract and more about my own mind, but I hope the images still resonate in the memories of all those who love trains.
Works from left to right:
Puzzle Pieces
16″ x 12”
$600
Conductor
18″ x 18.7″
$700
Blue Cube
16″ x 24″
$700
Rain Spots
16″ x 24″
$700
Shadow House
24″ x 16″
$700