thePULSEMeet the Professor and Artists Bringing Art to Engineering
By Alex Kantarelis
December saw something new from and for the students of WPI: an art gallery. Sounds simple, I know, but WPI is hardly known for its art students. It is mainly an engineering and science- oriented school. In fact, it does not have an art program at all and offers only a handful of art classes, and therein lies the reason that this new art gallery is so interesting and remarkable. Students with very little training but with a whole lot of talent and creativity were given a chance to display their artwork prominently in the school’s library for all to see.
It all began as part of the recently added Interactive Media and Game Development (IMGD) major at WPI. Students within the major were creating their own games and needed artistic guidance to do so. Enter Professor Joseph Farbrook, who joined the faculty in 2006. He was brought in to teach the fundamentals of art to the young minds of the major.
“As it turns out, when you start working in a field of interactive media or game development, you’re combining computer science for the activity or the functionality of it with art,” Farbrook said. “Art is half of it because you have to make some content for the game,” he added.
So, art was added at WPI, and classes quickly started filling up. Most students were interested mainly to further their own addiction to creativity. Farbrook’s course “Essentials of Art” taught the fundamentals ~ painting, drawing, and sculpture ~ which in turn led to the Essentials of Art Exhibit in the George C. Gordon Library in December. The exhibit showcased works by the students of Farbrook’s course.
Junior Damien Rigden, a mechanical engineering major, was part of the exhibit. His work, entitled “Green,” was a piece that was not only very striking, but also had a message. The painting was a very dark and almost gothic looking triptych, which is a painting done on three separate canvases, one large in the middle and two smaller on both sides. The three together become one body of work.
This particular painting shows the image of a man, a noose loosely around his neck, cutting down a tree while surrounded by tree stumps with dead bodies serving as tombstones. “I’m not necessarily the most environmentally conscious person but it came to me in a dream,” Rigden said. “If you were to sum it up literally, you kill a tree, you kill a person,” he added. Quite a dream it must have been to inspire such a powerful image. He went on to explain, “The noose around the man’s neck in the middle is symbolic of an umbilical chord, so not only are we born from this Mother Earth, but we are also still dependent upon it.”
Rigden displays a talent for art that seems completely natural. He has always considered himself artistic and sees engineering as an outlet for expressing his artistic desires. “I was always into art as a kid and in high school, I happened to get into engineering. What I got to see is the design aspect of engineering,” he said. As for being chosen for the gallery, “I was honored when they asked me to put it in the show, everyone goes in and out of that library, and everyone is going to see it,” he said.
Alexandra Sanseverino, a junior from New Haven, CT, had a similar experience. She had no experience painting before taking the class. The biotechnology major had a three-painting series chosen for the exhibit. “When I got to that class I had to learn to be more flexible and creative than I had been before,” she said. “At first I hated it because I just wanted to draw pictures, I didn’t want to do anything new and different,” she added.
The gallery featured many different works. Drawings, paintings, and sculptures from relative rookies in the art world were all displayed. “A lot of the students were shy to submit their art, and we had to go right to them and say these are the ones we want for the gallery,” Farbrook said.
But what’s equally important as this particular exhibition is the direction WPI is moving, combining technology with art. “Most art these days has some combination of technology, you almost can’t get away from it,” Farbrook said.
Some artists are painting directly on photographs, many are using computers and digital imagery to document their art, and of course, through advances in computer technology, a new form of graphic artist has evolved. It is clearly a new age for art. While most schools are taking steps towards becoming more technological in their art classes, WPI is doing the opposite. “We have the technological component and are bringing in the art, whereas most colleges have the art and are brining in the technological component,” Farbrook said.
WPI is in the forefront of this movement in art, and the Essentials of Art Exhibit is only the beginning. Not bad for an engineering school that has no art major.
