Press Releases

March 3, 2005

Southampton College Student Anticipates the Exhibition of His Award Winning Art

Contact:
Jordan Cook (jcook@southampton.liu.edu)
631-287-8313

Southampton, NY — Albany native Yikui Gu, a senior in Southampton College’s BFA program will exhibit his award winning art work at the college’s Avram Gallery during the week of May 18 - 21. His assignment was to create a piece that was 80 percent black, incorporating any natural material. He spread on his canvas a mixture of sand and gesso, but once it was dry he dismissed his first inclination to paint rocks and settled on something more challenging; himself.

"The technique is difficult," says Gu. "It requires very strong lighting conditions and the texture of gesso makes capturing the effect of shadow difficult. This project reminded me of cave paintings where bumps on the rock were incorporated into the pictures."

It was this experimental piece along with a pastel drawing of a cow in bucolic landscape that Gu submitted to an international art contest through The Artist’s Magazine in the late spring of 2004. He took second place in the "Experimental" category and third place in the category of "Animal".

When asked how proud he was of those award winning pieces, Gu replied "When I’m done with something, I don’t like it anymore. I’m always thinking about what I want to do next semester. What holds an appeal is what I haven’t painted yet.