February 8 – 26, 1965
Art Gallery, Eugenia Fuller Atwood Library
1965 BEAVER NEWS
“Young Artist Receives Depth of Expression” by Carole Huberman
Claire Van Vliet, the strong-minded young artist who taught graphics classes at Beaver last fall, is currently exhibiting 30 lithographs in the Atwood Library Gallery. Opening with a reception on Thursday afternoon, Feb. 11, the show continues through Feb. 26. Miss Van Vliet, who regularly teaches at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and is on the board of directors of the Print Club of Philadelphia, has exhibited in the area and abroad.
In both color and black and white lithographs, she achieves an amazing depth of expression and surface excitement with iconographies of sun, flowers, landscape, and figures.
Most eye-catching of the prints are the various color comments on the same design. Dominated by a circle of sun and its radiating color, the lower one-third of the print is filled with parted grass or wheat. The “Orange Sun” with violet and pink, the “Violet Sun” with golden yellow, the “Yellow Sun” with blue and green – all of the intense colors connote a definite image of heat. On a larger scale, Miss Van Vliet has used the same design in a poster for her lithograph exhibition in her native Canada next month.
Her figurative prints, all in black and white, reveal her greatest sensitivity. The portrait of “Country Doctor,” a head protectively buried in a big, dark collar and hat, is akin to German Expressionism. In tonal fashion rather than linear, the planes of the face are developed. Miss Van Vliet’s figures are contemplative and dramatic. Capturing the essence of Cervantes’ Don Quixote in “The Truth About Sancho Panza,” she depicts Sancho as real and round and grinning in dark solid tonal areas. In contrast, the figure of Don Quixote, the knight on horseback, is a delicately linear drawing, in the manner of his fantasy. Using a similar juxtaposition of heavy tone and light line, she depicts “The Watchman – Kafka.”
The variation of the surface qualities – the lines, textures, and tones – appear magnificently in her flower prints. An exceptionally good example, the large “Chrysanthemums,” in black and white, runs the full tonal range for exciting contrasts, and samples many different and meaningful surface techniques. In her landscapes also, Miss Van Vliet shows the same enthusiasm for texture and surface variation but adds the excitement of powerful color.
