UW FINE 220 students blend realism and abstraction in new oil painting exhibit ‘INWARD/OUTWARD’

UW unveils a new oil painting exhibit featuring the remarkable works of students from the FINE 220 class. The exhibit, titled “INWARD/OUTWARD,” opened on June 17 in ECH 1207 to an enthusiastic crowd of art aficionados, students, faculty, and community members.

FINE 220 is an oil painting course suited for beginner painters to teach students oil painting skills, such as how to work with colour, technical oil painting skills, and how to combine different mediums with oil paints. The exhibit is based on a larger scale assignment where the students had to combine references from one indoor space and one outdoor space into one painting that makes the viewer question if that area was painted from one reference photo. The paintings in the exhibit play with colour, texture, perspective, detail, and different mediums in addition to oil paint to create their masterpieces. 

“It’s good to have colour knowledge… they may feel they have to have that to come into this course, but I don’t think they do,” said Scott Everingham, the FINE 220 instructor. 

Everingham also outlined other projects that this course entails. “Students get to create content in the narrative and the subject matter, it just has to be a painting that exists between abstraction and representation,” Everingham said. “You have to be open to things changing along the way, you gotta take risks sometimes.”

Tessa Nazaruk, an ARBUS student with a visual culture major, weighed in on her experiences in FINE 220 and participating in this exhibition. “The class is an oil painting class that is very beginner level… it’s a good balance between drawing observation and more abstract and imaginative kinds of images,” Nazaruk said. “Now we’re using those skills in a more abstract manner like even in these paintings here, we’re trying to assemble the two different locations together in a way that’s half observational half abstract to try and reposition the space, take items out of the space put other items into it in a way that makes it look nice and cohesive.”

The exhibition not only shows FINE 220’s work to the UW community, but also to the other students. “I love looking around and having inspiration from other people’s work,” Nazaruk. 

The only prerequisite for this course is FINE 100, an intro to drawing course that mainly focuses on colour, animation, and sketching. 

Check out the “INWARD/OUTWARD” exhibition at East Campus Hall in room 1207 (The Artery) until July 22.