Artistically driven members of the KSC community had the chance to hear from renowned painter Angelina Gualdoni, who visited the Thorne-Sagendorph Art Gallery on Tuesday, Oct. 7, to give a PowerPoint presentation featuring various selections of her work, as well as commentary on her process and technique.
Associate Professor of Art and Design Emily Lambert arranged for Gualdoni to visit KSC and brought her class to the presentation, but it was open for all members of the KSC community to attend. Students from various art classes attended, as well as individual students who came out for their own enrichment.
Gualdoni is a New York City-based painter whose work has been featured at museums across the country and globe, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Queens Museum in New York, the St. Louis Art Museum in St. Louis, Mo., the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Conn. and the Museum de Paviljoens in Almere, Netherlands. Gualdoni is also a two-time Fellow of the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), and currently teaches painting at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA) at Tufts University in Boston.
Gualdoni said that she was honored and excited to share her story with the Keene State College artistic community, including how her interests in other hobbies, such as mushroom foraging, are communicated through her work.
“I draw a lot of inspiration from the quest of looking for mushrooms, even though I don’t picture them and my paintings aren’t about mushrooms. The things that I’ve learned in my effort to find mushrooms have really shaped the way that I think about the relationship between humans and the natural world, as well as humans within the natural world,” added Gualdoni.
Gualdoni said that she hoped the audience would rethink their relationship to the world around them.
“You need to notice something in order to start caring about it, thinking about it, working with it,” said Gualdoni. “It was the noticing of it, the way my eyes find these mushrooms, and the relationships between the plants and trees and quality of the soil that eventually became the subject matter and served to motivate me to make these particular paintings.”
Sophomore Peter Brown attended Gualdoni’s presentation, and said he was inspired by her art and insights. Brown said he enjoyed hearing about a specific painting by Gualdoni, in which she used the opposite side of a canvas to mirror a painting she was unsatisfied with.
“One of my big takeaways was how she was able to use both sides of the canvas. You don’t think of that quite often, and it was interesting to hear about. Whatever bleeds over from one side of the canvas to the other became the painting, and I found that fascinating, as well as her use of perspective,” said Brown.
“She was also talking about how she was delineating from the normal perspectives of landscapes by altering the perspective, rather than conveying a traditional landscape,” added Brown.
Clinical Assistant Professor of Art and Design Miles Warner said that hosting visiting artists and exposing them to the KSC community is central to the Thorne-Sagendorph Art Gallery’s mission, and praised Lambert for bringing Gualdoni to KSC.
“This was [Lambert’s] field of expertise, and seeing how her network and professional connections can impact what her students get to do and see is beyond something that I would know. It takes a village when it comes to these ideas to bring in a varied, interesting and different set of skilled artists to campus,” said Warner.
Ryan Pacheco can be contacted at
rpacheco@kscequinox.com
