By Mariella Bishop and Angelina Ricker
The Lovett art show showcases the incredible artwork and talent within our school’s community. This show is open to everyone: faculty and staff, special guests, and alumni, etc., and it also honors artists who have passed away.
Various types of artwork were on display: mixed media, ceramics, woodcutting, printmaking, acrylic, watercolor, collages, nail art, mixed clay, plant arrangements, and resin. Thirty-two artists took part in this show on November 5-8. We chatted with a few of them.
Rena Lyle – Flower Powered
When thinking of an art show, plant arrangements might not be the first thing that comes to mind. But Rena Lyle, the assistant office manager in the fine arts office, created the only floral arrangement art piece in the show.
Ms. Lyle grew up in New York. She explained that she grew fond of the pop art displayed in the city streets and museums. She looked up to Keith Haring, most known for his subway art and stick figure-like drawings.
Her love and passion for floral decorations stems (pardon the pun) from her past. After her father passed, people would bring flowers for her mom to put throughout the house. “It just brought her a lot of joy,” she told us. It also brought Ms. Lyle joy, and the gifts of flowers made her realize how much she was fascinated by them.
She started by assembling a bouquet of roses and realized they needed improvement. She went to floral school. “I learned about using different containers, how the colors and the scales can change, and then create a different kind of experience for the viewer,” she said.
Then she began to assemble additional bouquets with grocery store flowers with the ultimate goal: “bring joy to other people.”
Ms. Lyle’s bouquets are heavily influenced by a Japanese form of art called Ikebana. This practice originated from Buddhists, and it’s known for its asymmetry, symbolism, and shin, soe, and tai, which represent heaven, earth, and man.
“They have a way of taking simple ingredients and forms and then making them show movement and they incorporate nature,” she said.
At school, she has shared her creativity by hosting not only floral design classes, but also collaborating with the pottery class to make flower arrangements with decorative pots.
Ms. Lyle has been displaying her art for the Lovett school art show for three years now. She believes the way she arranges the flowers and the flowers themselves make her art stand out. Her pieces this year consisted of orchids surrounded by soil or moss that sit in vases. The orchids are accompanied by other flowers, leaves, and stems.
“For this show specifically, I use orchids because they have a little bit more longevity than a cut flower,” she explained.
When creating bouquets for herself, she tends to use more diverse flowers. She mentioned that there is one flower in particular that she likes to use.
“I tend to gravitate towards orange roses,” she said. “Those are my favorite.”
Before the interview ended, Ms. Lyle mentioned that she saw a little boy the other day who admired her work and expressed curiosity about it. One of the things that Ms. Lyle really enjoys about the art show is that it exposes children and adults to different forms of art they may have never seen.
“That ability to spark curiosity and joy in others is, to me, the secret sauce,” she said.
Albert Nascimento – Giraffe Man
Another Lovett faculty member, Albert Nascimento, shared his work at the Lovett art show. This is his first year participating.
“I asked, how can you get involved? Can teachers get involved? And I was told, yeah, absolutely. So this year I figured I would try to get involved,” he told us.
When viewing his artwork, we noticed that he had created a number of pieces featuring giraffes, all set against different colored backgrounds and poses.
Why giraffes? “In middle school, I caught a growth spurt, and I grew six inches one summer, and I was much taller than everybody,” he said. “They started calling me ‘giraffe’. I just took it as a positive and then I started loving giraffes.” Later on, he went to Spain, where he got up close and personal with the animals. “I went to a zoo and it was an open zoo. I got to feed giraffes, interact with giraffes, and I was just like, yeah, dude, this is my animal,” he said.
Each giraffe painting, Mr Nascimento said, took a couple of hours. The paintings had to have multiple layers of paint and be sealed at the end. The giraffes are the most recent art pieces that he submitted to the art show.
His favorite piece that he designed was the one that took him the longest: Eternal Soul. This piece took him a couple of years to complete.
“I no longer have an extra bedroom where I can paint, so I don’t paint as much. So that’s why it’s been just a long thing. But really I finished it, and I’m doing air quotes because I feel like I could always add more to it,” Mr. Nascimento said.
The painting is supposed to represent Native American culture and life and resistance to the erasure of colonialism. This is why Mr. Nascimento chose to make the headdress very colorful.
A painting of Audrey Hepburn painting is his second favorite because of the inclusion of little mirror pieces. He says that he likes how the mirrors allow the viewer to see themselves in it.
Mr. Nascimento’s main medium is acrylic paint, but he does paint on other things besides canvases. He explained that he liked to paint on jean jackets and give them to friends as gifts, which we personally thought was super cool.
“To be totally honest, I’m a little scared of oil paints,” he said. But he does plan on attempting oil painting once he gets a solid space to paint.
The paintings Mr. Nascimento displayed for the art show all have one thing in common: they are in a pop style. “I’ve just always been inspired by pop art and pop art murals and things like that,” he told us, “and the bright colors just generally make me happy.”
Fun fact, Mr. Nascimento is a self-taught artist. Throughout middle school, he had taken the usual required elective art classes, but after school he continued to paint and work with art, teaching himself more along the way.
As an English teacher, he said he’d love to incorporate more art into his class, assigning projects that showcase creativity. While being a teacher is time-consuming, he would still love to continue doing art in his free time and plans to do the Lovett art show next year, too.
“I found it very fun and would love to share and create more of my art,” he said.
Gina Reynoso – Going Solar
Gina Reynoso, a high school art teacher, was also featured in the show with a special form of art: printmaking This is her fourth time participating in the Lovett art show.
Her pieces were prints of animals: some of her cats, and a few of a rabbit she had spotted in her yard. She used techniques such as lithography, relief, and solar plate.
Lithography is a form of print where you draw on a limestone with a greasy kind of pencil and then etch the stone using acid. Doing this allows the stone surface to undergo a chemical process where parts of the stone are hydrophilic and parts of the stone are hydrophobic so that the parts that repel water will stay white and the other parts will receive ink.
Solar plate is another technique that she used. A solar plate is a photo sensitive etching plate. She used etching in the first step of the process. “The ink goes in the lines instead of the surface,” she explained, and this specific piece has got “an emulsion on it, and this one is exposed with UV light. That’s why it’s called solar plate.”
What inspired her to create a piece using a solar plate was a visit to her home in Peru. “I was really focused on trying to piece together memories of childhood. We came across the old house that we used to live in and I don’t know, it just kind of came out of that experience. It’s just noticing how many things had changed, physical things that had changed. The house was painted differently; they had built a fence around the community where I had lived, but then a lot of the landscape was the same. So it was kind of looking at these natural landmarks as guidelines,” she said.
Printmaking is her main form of art, and it’s something she loves. “It uses so many different skill sets and it can look like painting, a drawing, or look like a combination of things,” she explained. She also mentioned that with printmaking, she doesn’t get bored with the process unlike drawing and painting which can feel a little “limiting.”
Ms. Reynoso has been printmaking since she was a sophomore in college, and she still loves to create pieces not just for the show, but for herself. Many things around her inspire her, such as her cats, who she loves dearly, and her hometown in Peru.
In the future, she hopes to continue her journey with etching and drawing, but she is determined to keep creating more prints.
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In addition to Lovett alumni and staff, the Lovett art show also brings attention to Lovett artists who have passed away.
According to a poster at the show, Lesley Stanfield Becker (‘89) took particular interest in animals, nature, and photography when she went to Lovett. She became a photographer for her college, University of North Carolina, and photographed wildlife in North Carolina for the National Audubon Society.
She then proceeded to photograph fashion and experiment with underwater photography in Santa Barbara. Then she began travelling. “Lesley’s adventurous spirit and love of travel culminated in a photojournalism expedition capturing life along the Niger River in Mali and SE Asia,” the poster said.
Finally, there was work by Tom Zwierlein, who taught at Lovett School for years. He was nicknamed “Z”, and was the light in many people’s lives. He also “shaped the heart and soul of our Visual Arts program.” He was a believer in never giving up, saying to people, “fall down seven times, get up eight.”
Mr. Zwierlein was a renowned potter who shared his work at the Anderson Ranch Art Center, Callanwolde Arts Center, the University of Kentucky, the Hambidge Center, and the Governor’s Honors Program. “He held each of us, his students and colleagues, in memory and affection, always with a story to tell,” his poster said.
And perhaps that’s what was at the heart of all of our conversations with the artists: that their effort and dedication is about telling stories.
