Theory / Practice

Scott Michael Raynor / Chair and Professor, Art and Graphic Design

The Met Project | In the Spring of 2022 I made the decision that I would make a single drawing in each room of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. At the time I was dealing with several personal issues, the loss of a close family member and some overall artistic restlessness. The pandemic and the difficult political discourse in our country added to my unease. Art has always been a haven and my way of dealing with every aspect of my life and this time would be no different.

The method is simple and straightforward. I would enter a gallery in the museum and spend time looking around at the various works. Looking for the one thing that told a story that connected to me. I also needed something visual to latch onto as well. Once I determined the right piece to draw it was off to work. Armed with my sketchbook and various pens and markers I would start drawing. Drawing a work of art takes you to a different level of looking. You see much more carefully, and my brain separates into two equal parts. One half of my brain is measuring, looking at proportions, thinking about form and shading while the other half is meandering.

Mark E Brown / Associate Professor of Art

My work deals with connections; connections implied, inherent, and imagined between objects, ideologies, pop culture, and materials. 

Sculptural works incorporate physical connections; nails, junctions, appliqués, knots…all forming integral fragments designed to articulate a narrative of fabrication to the viewer. 

My current sculptural works engage a nontraditional materiality employing media with histories of political and societal commodification; specifically elements that spoil, degrade, or are characteristically transient. The semiotics of these materials, in concert with eclectic metaphorical symbols and imagery, form commentaries on broken socio-political structures and elicit rumination, reaction, and discourse.

Kurinuki is a traditional Japanese form of hand building revolving around a meditative working process. The word means ‘carving out’ and involves shaping a solid block of clay, then carving out a vessel to create interior space. It is a more sculptural approach to making and the interior of the piece is just as important as the exterior.

Janice Dougherty / Instructor of Visual Arts

This body of work is a manifestation of a restless and curious mind that likes to stay grounded in analytical representation or float above the clouds in whisps of color and form. I was formally trained as a medical illustrator and have practiced this craft for nearly two decades in addition to a career in other categories of design and illustration. I find wonder and excitement in translating complicated and nuanced processes into comprehendible drawings. There’s also the magic of visualizing the things we typically cannot see or dare not try to see. This investigation of the human form and all its sinewy, fleshy or calcified components finds its way into other aspects of my work, inevitably, only with more colors and expanding forms. My heroes of the art and illustration practice, including but not limited to Heinz Edelmann, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, and Milton Glaser, have had an indelible impact on how I see and what I create. The secret thread of continuity between these pieces is proof of their influence combined with something deeper, ineffable, and impatient to emerge.

Carrie Allyson Dryer / Associate Professor of Graphic Design

Through open systems, I create structures that embody personal and universal states of change. After my brother’s death, my work has focused on the loss of integral networks and attachment systems. I use skeletal structures juxtaposed with environmental references as an oscillation of micro/personal to macro/environmental. This direction is connected with the current state of our environment, where dependent systems are degrading and destabilizing, like remnants of lost systems left behind. The skeletal systems reference personal loss and the human attachment system. The environment becomes the fractured structure that remains; surface and depth; outside and inside; skin and environment. Psychological spaces are transformed into physical environments creating traces of loss that display the degeneration of memory, decline of future expectations, and degradation of prior belief systems. I seek to define complex emotional spaces representing layered moments in time where the dualities of unstoppable forces meet unmovable objects. Through metaphorical juxtapositions, dissected from states of isolation and tension, metaphorical landscapes are created. Parts and pieces of iconic shapes play as psychological metaphors. The act of organizing these objects creates a formula for understanding. See More

Cory Gurley / Visual Arts Instructor

Cory Gurley is a graphic designer and illustrator with a background in literary studies and a passion for board games. He specializes in creating vector graphics using Adobe Illustrator. 

Inspired by a strange combination of folklore and mythology, traditional Asian art, science fiction, and mid-century cartoons, Cory’s work draws from literary and emotional themes such as nostalgia, isolation, transformation, and hope. His work is deeply symbolic yet invites the viewer to interpret each piece through the lens of his or her own emotional experience.

Cory is also an aspiring board game designer with several prototypes in various stages of completion. He believes that board games come alive through a compelling fusion of illustration, graphic design, game mechanics, and world-building, a combination that makes the process of developing and playing such games creatively satisfying in ways unique to the medium.

Bruce Shores / Visual Arts Instructor

Recently I became enamored of Chinese watercolors. To this end I bought a set of Chinese watercolors and begin researching the techniques and philosophy surrounding this medium. The difference between Western and Chinese watercolors is the inclusion of sizing in the Chinese watercolors. This allows for the support to be more absorbent like you find in Mulberry paper, a traditional Chinese paper. So the application of the watercolor is dependent on more absorbent paper. Spontaneity and essence are essential.

Chinese watercolor is either mineral or vegetable based. One is opaque and the other translucent. When it is used with sumi ink it becomes the guest of the host of sumi ink. The opaque watercolor is painted on the back of the paper so the sumi ink/host is not obscured. The translucent watercolor is painted on the front of the paper as it will not obscure the host.

My goal in this work was to honor the traditional wisdom of Asian art as it applies to personal subject matter surrounding me in my wife’s flower gardens, figure studies and former paintings of mine, the wildlife around our house and a Great Egret hanging around a seafood processing building in Georgetown, SC.

Benita VanWinkle / Associate Professor of Visual Arts

“Please Remain Standing” is a passionate plea to save vintage movie theaters across the United States built before 1965 and the affront of multiplex theaters.  This project originated with a school assignment to “paint with light in the dark”. I chose to light the interior of the Carib Theatre, in Clearwater, Florida, having worked at the bank next door as a teen and experiencing many pivotal moments of my youth at the theater. Within two years the beloved theater with its Egyptian themed history of cinema towering several stories high on the auditorium walls was torn down to make a downtown parking lot. Realizing the considerable value the common gathering space of a theater provides for recreation, non-religious assembly, education, and community building, it became my mission to photograph as many of them as feasible, especially in small towns, and to record personal stories of attending these touchstones when possible. While I have now documented over 900 theaters in 47 states, I sincerely doubt this project will ever be complete for me. Beloved traditional movie theaters tend to create something most of us wish there was a bit more of: tolerance, cooperation, celebration of diversity, and community.

Lisa Woods / Adjunct Visual Arts

After completing a series of work that lasted for most of the raising of my now 25 year-old, I started playing music as my creative outlet. This was much easier on my arthritis and gave me time to think about what to do next.

And then, 2020 came.

I lost my studio space, so I had to think differently about art making in a much smaller space. I was relegated to creating small drawings on my dining room table. In addition to the problems with my arthritis, I was having to test for osteoporosis, glaucoma, and a bunch of other age-related stuff, and my doctor told me if I didn’t take an old-lady osteoporosis medicine, my bones would ‘turn to dust.’ This was my light bulb moment, and Bones To Dust became the title of my new series of drawings. I began ruminating about how aging affects one’s life: can’t bend as far, lift as much, last as long, etc. and I set about exploring my physical ailments through drawing. I always ask my doctors for images of my scans, tests, and x-rays (they think I’m nuts) and often incorporate these elements and other personal symbols into the drawings.

At the end of 2020, my father passed away. After a long and good life, his last few years brought suffering with nearly every imaginable ailment and started me thinking about what he passed on to me physically. The installation is about two things: the aging process in general and the things specific to me that I ’inherited’ from my dad.