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Sculptures by two students were unveiled Tuesday at the Breast Cancer Awareness Garden in Riverside Park on Larry Holmes Drive in downtown Easton.
Biology major Michael Cahn ’04 (Woodbury, N.Y.) and art major Jesse Morgan ’05 (Amherst, Mass.) made the sculptures in the Williams Visual Arts Building as part of an independent study course led by Alastair Noble, assistant professor of art.
The ceremony was held by the Women in Business Council of the Two Rivers Area Chamber of Commerce, which maintains the garden.
Cahn created “Stepping Stones,” a spiral stone birdbath. The works of Noguchi and Michelangelo served as his inspiration. Morgan created “Reflection,” a contemplative piece made from twigs and branches, which faces the Delaware River. His inspiration was “the transcendental meditative experience of facing a major life battle.”
The first sculptures for the garden were made through the independent study course last semester by psychology major Matthew O’Donnell ’05 (Brewster, Mass.) and computer science major Matthew Hokanson ’05 (Biddeford, Maine).
Morgan nearly always begins each of his paintings and sculptures with a simple, clear mental picture. Then, gradually, purposefully, he adds complexity to the vision, making it less clear, more enigmatic.
“I like to take realistic things and distort them,” he says.
This semester, he’s been working especially hard at bringing his altered visions into reality in his two independent study courses. In addition to the garden piece, he’s been painting vibrantly colored “surreal, cartoony, comic-book-animation-style” pieces in oil and displaying them in the Williams Visual Arts Building.
Morgan says that the chair sculpture evolved from a set of preliminary drawings to several models that he presented to a five-member committee from the Women in Business Council. After committee members selected one of the models, he went to work on the full-size piece, crafting a chair from twigs and branches, carving a spiral vine pattern into the bark, and placing the work atop a nine-foot-high tree.
“I wanted to go with a natural look,” he says. “At first I thought of something like a bench.”
Noble describes Morgan’s work as “out of the box.”
Ed Kerns, Eugene H. Clapp II ’36 Professor of Art and Morgan’s adviser for his independent study in painting, says the student’s work, which includes mostly medium- to large-scale landscapes, has “an anthropomorphic quality.”
Morgan plans to spend the summer as an assistant in the Visual Arts Building’s Grossman Gallery and begin a senior honors project in art in the fall. He arrived at Lafayette intending to major in economics and business, but soon realized that art was his calling.
“All my life, I’ve always been drawing and doodling,” he says. “I got into painting during my senior year in high school. Once I got to Lafayette, I took an art class pretty muchevery semester as I was taking my economics classes.”
Eventually, he says, he realized he’d rather pursue art wholeheartedly.
“I figured, why not do what I love?” he says.
Morgan, a graduate of Williston Northampton School in Amherst, Mass., says Lafayette’s art faculty and the facilities at the Williams Visual Arts Building, including personal studio space, made that decision much easier.
“I absolutely love the art department here,” he says. “Any materials we want are right in front of us. Any help we need is right there.”
Morgan adds that he’s benefited both from Lafayette’s dedicated faculty and from the local and visiting artists who work in the Visual Arts Building and display their pieces in the gallery.
“They’ve taught me so much, even little things, like art vocabulary and little tricks I can use,” he says.