If you step into the Ameen art gallery in Talbot Hall you will come face-to-face with the school of art’s various personalities: faculty, staff, students and other characters that give the department its distinctive quality.
However, these are not the individuals themselves. You have a better chance of catching them in the hallways. Rather, it is paintings of them; their visages etched in oil on large masonite boards.
These portraits are the handiwork of Steve Breerwood, graduating senior from Houma, and longtime staple of the departments painting room. Since last semester he has been working on paintings for his senior show. Technically the show is Art 499, a course senior art students need to pass in order to graduate from the department.
Breerwood has always specialized in representational art, and of late has turned to portraiture; practicing for his show by painting his peers in the department.
But when choosing the subjects for final production, Breerwood did not want to limit himself to students.
“I did not want the show to be totally about Gen-Xers, so that is why I also also used some of the faculty,” Breerwood said.
Included are portraits of two professors including Dennis Sioporski and Robert Carpenter, Breerwood’s painting teacher.
However, Breerwood’s favorite painting is of Talbot Hall’s recently retired custodial engineer, Irving.
“The one I did of Irving is my favorite painting, just because I think I captured his personality and characteristics so well,” Breerwood says.
Of the students, Breerwood included Betsy Foreman, a graduating senior herself who was president of Kappa Pi, the art fraternity.
Also included were Tim Orgeron, notoriously known in art circles as “The Fuzz”, graduate Joshua “Clarence” Hue, associate Chris Quave and Breerwood’s girlfriend Christi Brunet.
For production, Breerwood took photographs of the subjects.
He said he did not slavishly copy the photographs, but rather used them as a reference while painting.
“I work from from photos, which some people might have a problem with. But it is just a tool for expediency,” he said.
In his artist’s statement, Breerwood makes the point that using cameras in art is nothing new. Van Eyck used a device known as a camera obscura in Renaissance times.
Other advantages Breerwood cites in utilizing photographs is the ability to select from negatives, the ease of cropping the image, the
As for the scale, Breerwood tried to stay as close to real life as possible. All of the portraits are 6 feet high by 2 feet wide except for his self-portrait.
“The concept is to make it the same as if you were to meet the person. The scale is not too far away from life-size,” he said.
According to the statement, a good portrait is not just determined by replicating a likeness.
“Ask the average person what constitutes a good portrait, and he will probably say it depends on how well the artist, in this case the painter, captured the likeness of the subject,” he says.
“However, this is only half of what constitutes good portraiture in my mind . . . My goal as a portrait painter is to render an individual’s whole persona.”
“I work with the subject’s facial expression, gesture, pose, choice of clothing and the overall light key and color composition of each piece,” Breerwood says.
In his statement, Breerwood makes references to contemporary painters such as Chuck Close and old masters such as Van Eyck and Vermeer.
He notes that his teachers and peers were his main inspiration.
However, his primary artistic influence is figuritive painter Lucian Freud, distant relative of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.
“If you want to talk about direct influences, I would say that Lucian Freud was a big influence, because of the way he deals with the human figure,” Breerwood says.
Freud’s paintings were very three-dimensional, almost sculptural in texture. Though Breerwood’s paintings are not nearly as textured as Freud’s work, the surface quality of his pieces had an impact on the portraits.
To develop his skill at depicting the human form, Breerwood took figure drawing classes along with his painting classes.
Playing in the background in the Ameen gallery is Breerwood’s very own brand of acoustic alt-rock, even though he dislikes such categorization considering the current state of alternative rock.
With many of the art shows, the organizer tries to correspond the mood of the music with the subject matter of the show. However, Breerwood says that that the only relation is that both the paintings and music are artistic creations by himself.
“With the music I am not so much trying to have a soundtrack to the show, it is just that it is something that I have created, as the paintings are also something that I have created. So there is a correlation,” he says.