Seeing the Light

SEEING THE LIGHT

It was a wrong turn on the interstate that steered artist Brenda McCollum onto the right path in her work. And it was a class with nationally known painter Ed Shay, an SIUC professor of art, that converted her to the medium she needed: watercolor.

When McCollum graduated from Rend Lake Community College (Ill.) and transferred to SIUC as an art major, she was painting mostly with acrylics. Watercolor initially frustrated her; she was used to layering and glazing paint in ways that would produce a muddy mess in watercolors.

Detail of "Beneath the Surface," a watercolor painting by Brenda McCollum But the class with Shay gave her the practice she needed to master this medium—specifically, transparent watercolor, which doesn’t use white paint. "If you use watercolor [paint] without white, the light will go through it and bounce back off the paper. That gives the painting more of a translucent appearance," she explains.

McCollum had always wanted to capture light in her work, and always been fascinated by the kaleidoscopic patterns light made as it shone through glass. During a road trip with local artist and mentor Sarah Capps, the two missed their exit from I-57, got off, and "wandered into this little town with three little antique stores," says McCollum.

"Really they were junk stores. I saw old bottles and jars in these dark stores, and something about the way the light was coming through them drew my attention."

She photographed them—the start of a fruitful preoccupation with collecting, photographing, and painting glass containers. Light "has the ability to take ordinary vessels and transform them into the extraordinary," she writes in her artist’s statement.

McCollum began doing luminous but straightforward watercolor paintings of bottles and jars on shelves or tables. One of her first glass acquisitions was an old, cobalt-blue Vicks Salve bottle, and her first bottle painting showed only blue bottles. Since then, she always includes at least one blue bottle in each painting.

"Blue represents the spirit in Christianity, and blue is my favorite color," she says. "That blue bottle ties everything together."

One of the earlier paintings in the bottle series, titled "Chemistry 101," won Best of Show last year in the national 9th Annual Juried Art Exhibit at the Jasper (Indiana) Arts Center. But only after a critique in Shay’s class did McCollum realize that light itself, not the bottles, was the real subject of her recent work.

"I had always wanted to paint light, and I was finally doing it and didn’t realize it," she says.

With Shay’s endorsement, she applied for and won an SIUC Undergraduate Research/Creativity Award of $1,500 to create a set of paintings exploring light as a metaphor for spirituality. The shifting play of light symbolizes the way the human spirit changes and evolves, she says.

Not surprisingly, her favorite glass containers are those with personality—old jars with pearlescent patinas from the contents they once held, or old bottles that have been unearthed and bear metal encrustations and scars. "They’re not pristine anymore," she says.

Shay had been encouraging McCollum to produce bigger-scale works, and the SIUC grant, among other things, allowed her to buy special rolls of extra-large, high-grade watercolor paper.

"But I think the biggest thing this grant has done for me is that my style has evolved," she says. The works she’s produced for the grant project are more colorful, close-up, and abstract-looking than her earlier paintings in the bottle series. Parts of them resemble melted stained glass.

They've expanded her artistic range while still satisfying her love of realism. How so? As she notes, they’re a faithful rendition of the abstract planes and swirls of light cast by the colored bottles.

Each painting takes McCollum two to three months to complete. She starts by studying the light on different bottle setups and in photographs, collaging elements she’s interested in. She does pencil sketches and then, when she’s satisfied, a full-size pencil drawing on the watercolor paper. Only then does she paint.

Although McCollum’s recent works have grown more vibrant, she still prefers her paintings to "make quiet statements," enabling viewers to draw from the work "something that’s personal to them." One of her favorite artists is Edward Hopper. "I love the way Hopper did light," she says. "Most people only know his oil paintings, but he did a lot of watercolors on location. They’re so still and quiet."

McCollum has exhibited her work in venues in Illinois, Missouri, and Indiana, and has won awards in several competitive art shows. This spring, just as Perspectives was going to press, it was announced that she was one of four winners of the SIUC School of Art and Design's prestigious Rickert-Ziebold awards, which included a $5,000 prize. A member of the Illinois Artisans Program, she’ll exhibit the finished series of bottle paintings sometime this year at the affiliated Southern Illinois Art Gallery in Whittington—fittingly, located right off I-57, the highway that launched her new artistic explorations.

"I don’t know where my paintings will be in six months," she says, "but I can’t see myself not painting glass, now that I like it so much. It’ll probably be ongoing for the rest of my life."

—Marilyn Davis

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