On Monday, November 16th, it was freezing - the chilliest night of the year yet! But faithfully, at 5:30 pm, the students enrolled in Ann Morton’s ART113 Color Theory class came knowing they had a long night ahead. They were equipped with headlamps, gloves, woolen hats and coats. So what was their mission on this cold evening? Each student was tasked with creating a hole in the concrete sidewalk - that’s right, a hole.
Not a “real” hole, but one created using a variety of technical strategies of color and composition to create the illusion of a hole - with an imaginary world beyond, or emerging, from this imaginary opening in the concrete. Employing techniques of overlapping, linear perspective, diminishing scale, color atmosphere, vertical placement and receding color, students created a series of surprising "tromp l’oeil" scenes (French for “deceive the eye”), interrupting the viewers’ perception of depth as they encountered the normally mundane concrete sidewalk just in front of the art room, J141, at the northeast end of campus.
Students Isabel Kolodziejczyk, Lucky Omolo, Tara Phelps, Amber Ries Manning, Mary Rousu, Fallon Shell-Kenny, Travis Tubinaghtewa, Kailey Vandervoort, and Natalia Vasconcellos De Almeida Jose worked from a small color mock-up they made of their image to enlarge it to a 48” x 48” square on the concrete using a specially vibrant chalk made just for sidewalk artwork.
By the end of the evening, covered in chalk dust, cold and tired, but feeling a sense of real accomplishment, the class headed home, leaving their amazing artwork behind until time and weather will wash it all away.