Author: Vivien Reece
Amid the disarray of Weingart’s art studio, with its scores of canvases on easels and walls, widespread smatterings of dried paint all over the floor and high stools and waste bins in clumsy places, Elise Hampilos leans her head forward with her hands on her hips, staring at the canvas in front of her. Hampilos, a sophomore art major from Connecticut, contemplates the strengths and weaknesses of a new project she has begun recently, in which she must emulate a famous contemporary painter.
Hampilos chose Mark Tansey, a California painter known for his invention of the brainstorming process of the “color wheel.”
“The color wheel is really more like a word wheel,” she explained. “So I decided to go and get people’s words from the Marketplace. They gave me some really random stuff.” Hampilos spins her wheel a few times, puts a finger on it and reads aloud the first two sets of words she comes across: “Civil War, building, hatter. Marriage counseling, masticating, beekeeper.” Hampilos wanted to test this process for herself in this project and see what she could create with just a wheel of words.
“Mine turned out to be ‘Greek column, defying, catastrophe,’” she said, acknowledging the canvas half-covered in different shades of orange paint. The painting is very much in its rough phase, with pencil sketches taking up half of the canvas. An orange Greek column looms along the right side of the canvas beneath an orange sky and the sketches reveal a mound of architectural ruins with spray paint all over them, spelling out the names Euclid, Aristotle, Homer and Polykleitos. On the lower left-hand part of the piece crouches a young graffiti artist holding a spray can.
“Basically it has to do with the idea of what’s considered art,” she said. “[My narrative is] Greek architectural ruins avoiding the catastrophe of being covered in street art, but is that really a catastrophe?”
A fan of street art, Hampilos remains optimistic about the value of high art with the surge of street art, self-taught artists and new media. “One theme in class is whether painting has reached its limit or not,” she explained. “But art is just going in so many different directions. Subjectivities are always going to be changing.”
Hampilos’s own subjectivities and themes seem to be in constant flux as well. Although she insists that she is not political, her most recent projects belie that notion.
Two of Hampilos’s pieces, both sculptures, are on display in AGC. One is a sculpture of a woman’s head covered in a burqa; the other is a child’s wheelchair with a beautiful flowing sculpture of pennies slinking out of the seat. “I wanted to illustrate facial beauty alongside the sartorial signifier of [the Musilm] culture that is widely considered as hostile towards ours,” wrote Hampilos as part of the accompanying caption to the first sculpture.
The second sculpture also deals with socio-political matters, namely, the controversy of lowering funds for healthcare and special education. In this caption Hampilos wrote, “The pennies . . . evoke the desolation people feel as they gradually disappear from the public consciousness.”
The physical beauty, intellectual depth and political tension of her sculptures reveal Hampilos’s talent. But she did not always know she was an artist, even though she enjoyed drawing and painting as hobbies in her childhood. “I think people from high school would be surprised to know that I actually study art and art history,” she said. “Everybody would have thought it would be math.”
The initial change may have come during an internship after her senior year of high school at a Connecticut bakery where she realized she was good at sculpture.
“My boss didn’t have much for me to do anymore. She was like, ‘Try to make a crab out of gum paste.’ It’s basically like play-dough. So I just did my thing,” she recounted. “I didn’t expect it, it just happened. When my boss saw it, she sent me home and said, ‘Wow, I have a lot of work for you to do.’ Then I got a full-time job as a decorator.”
Hampilos has other jobs in mind as a budding artist. “In an ideal world, I’d either be a sculptor in the modeling department of animation at Pixar or something like that or in special effects makeup. Probably [makeup] because it relies so heavily on sculpture,” she said.
Despite the adage of artists struggling to find work, Hampilos remains convinced that there are job opportunities everywhere for people with sculptural talent. For now, she concentrates on her paintings and sculptures and spends free time on the internet looking at artists’ blogs and websites, such as Blue Canvas. Hampilos has not yet posted any of her work online, though.
“I’m waiting until I find my place a bit more,” she said.
Still in the process of discovering who she is as an artist and what she wants to express, Hampilos will continue to practice her art, discover new processes and portrayals and surprise members of the Occidental community with more sculptures.
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