Author: Andrea Wong
While the campus-wide celebration of President Jonathan Veitch’s inauguration may have only lasted a weekend, Art History and the Visual Arts Professor Linda Lyke’s commemoration of the event will be a part of Occidental’s campus forever. In late May, before summer had officially begun, Lyke was commissioned by President Veitch to create a piece of artwork for his upcoming inauguration. Once commissioned, Lyke began a long process that turned her vision into an art piece that would fully reflect the significance of Occidental College.
“The artwork was commissioned because Veitch suggested it. He is very interested in the idea of art as a destination,” Lyke explained. “At the time, I was the only one ready with an idea.”
Presented on Friday, Oct. 23, the day before Veitch’s inauguration, Lyke’s artwork was installed just outside of the Coons Administrative Center. Entitled “Pentimento Montage,” it consists of 26 one-foot-square tiles divided into three separate parts. The initial concept of Lyke’s vision showed the college through different perspectives, including everyone from the students to the Marketplace staff. She wanted to capture the wealth of history associated with Oxy, as well as its current involvement in various societal affairs. In order to capture so many numerous viewpoints over such a long period of time, Lyke decided to create a “montage,” or a collage of various images that act as a general representation of Occidental.
“The word ‘pentimento’ refers to the underlying image that appears in a painting when the top layer becomes transparent with age or is scratched away,” Lyke’s commission reads. The metaphor continues when she further explains that, “In a very real sense, each tile functions as a pentimento and montage in the way they represent images from Oxy’s past juxtaposed with more contemporary images.”
While the term “pentimento” captures one of the many themes of Lyke’s artwork, “montage” refers to the collection of drawings, writings, quotes and photographs compiled in the piece. Although the work consists of 26 tiles, each tile contains numerous images layered upon each other. This inventive effect seems to capture the true depth of Occidental’s vast history in the arts, politics and Los Angeles community. It also reveals just how extensively Lyke researched Oxy’s past.
Although Lyke has been working at Occidental as an art professor for 32 years, she explained that her research exposed her to many “notable events . . . that have been largely forgotten.” She enjoyed finding some the lesser known stories behind the college that she has been a part of for so long. Most of the images featured in the tiles come from the first hundred years of Occidental’s history because one of her main references, a book by the Cleland Professor Emeritus of History at Occidental College Andrew Rolle, focused on this time period. She also noted that delving further into Oxy’s past would require more than a mere 26 tiles.
In order to diversify her sources, Lyke also interviewed College Archivist Jean Paule and spent hours in the college’s Special Collections. It was through this research that she found not only the images that she needed in order to create her piece, but the wealth of information that lies behind our small college as well. Important Oxy figures she incorporated into the piece include famous poet Robinson Jeffers and current Diplomacy and World Affairs Professor Derek Shearer, who served as an Ambassador in Finland.
“The hard part was doing the research in Special Collections,” said Lyke. When asked how she decided which images and tidbits of information to use she explained that she chose “whimsical images; what strikes you as an artist.”
Once Lyke completed her exhaustive research of Occidental’s past, she was then faced with the challenge of presenting all this information in a single comprehensive piece. In order to create the effect she wanted, Lyke decided to use a technique called photo etching. This technique allowed Lyke to scan images, then layer them on top of each other. While many of the images come from Oxy’s historical records, Lyke also included some of her own sketches – the roses, camera and tools were all hand drawn by her. The heavily layered images that Lyke photo-etched accurately represent how the Occidental College that we know today is truly due to the cumulative work of so many different individuals.
Dramatizing the black images of the collage, Lyke used various striking hues of pink, orange and yellow to make the piece stand out on campus. In order to get the complete effect that she wanted, she used a two-step process that allows the color to show from behind the images. Lyke said that she chose such dramatic colors because they contrast the stark modernism of the Coons building. Furthering the historical emphasis of the piece, Lyke even used ink from some of the time periods depicted.
“The psychedelic pink ink is from the ’80s,” she said. She wanted the bright hues to attract viewers who would remain interested once they see the complicated collage imposed on them. “I want the colors to be able to be seen from the plaza,” she said.
Although the majority of Lyke’s piece was created through the process of photo etching, the six center tiles that depict an aerial view of the campus were produced through another process called monotype, which much of her previous artwork utilizes. What stands out most about the center tiles, aside from their difference against the photo etched ones, is the fact that they are centrally focused on the campus itself. Although the campus is depicted within Eagle Rock and Los Angeles, the surrounding areas have been somewhat generalized. Lyke explained that this was intentional, because she wanted to capture the simultaneous secluded uniqueness and connection to the community that exists in Occidental.
As Lyke continually worked on her project, she was struck by further inspiration from a few rather unexpected sources. The more that she worked with her hands and her tools to produce the product she wanted, the more she realized the importance of tools and what they symbolized. “I like the idea of tools used to do creativity, tools that the workers used,” she said. “Not many people know that Robinson Jeffers was not only a poet, but that he also built his own house, called Tor house. I see his work with words and masonry as metaphoric – he worked with the bricklaying of tools and words,” Lyke explained. “I came up with [the concept of tools] because my art process is so intense.”
Following similar ideas, navigational instruments are also a rather large motif in the piece. Lyke came up with notion of featuring navigational tools after finding an old book called “The Art of Navigation.” She views the concept of navigation as a reflection of how we, the students and staff of Occidental, are all navigating our way through college. She also felt that the idea of navigation properly captures the time element that her tiles also explore.
Among the handful of tools and other sketches that Lyke drew are an amazing collection of historical documents from Occidental’s past and present. The colored tiles seem to be ordered somewhat chronologically, ending with one focused on Oxy’s most famous student, President Obama ’83. Hand-edited musical scores, signed letters, topographical maps of the area, black and white snapshots and poetic quotes surround the center image of the Occidental Campus, illustrating the amazing ratio of thoughts and ideas that come from our campus compared to its size. Although our school may be small, what it has produced has been anything but. Furthermore, each image seems to hold its own unique story.
After months of laboring over the images that “Pentimento Montage” would depict, the final step of the process was sending them to a tile maker to be glazed onto the 26 tiles. While researching and producing the images had
been a lot of work for Lyke, she explained that this final step turned out to be the most stressful.
“At the end of the project it became crunch time because the tile maker needed so many weeks to make the tiles,” said Lyke. “The tile printer has to lay out a thin glaze,” she continued. “It eventually turned out that the tiles had to be sent to Italy to get the right colors.” This meant that the tiles arrived just in time, on the Tuesday before the inauguration, to be installed. The day-long installation process was captured by Marc Campos, Occidental’s photographer, who took a photograph every five seconds and condensed them into a one-minute video posted on YouTube. “After four months of research, printing prints and sending the tiles off, the situation was difficult because you have to depend in the people on the other end,” Lyke said.
Now that “Pentimento Montage” has been completed, President Veitch is delighted with the final result. Referring to both its aesthetic beauty and insightful meaning, he said that the “piece is fantastic and gives the campus a sense of its rich history.”
Nonetheless, Lyke hardly seems to see her work on “Pentimento Montage” as complete. “I want students to become more interested in the history of the college because there are people who have given their entire life’s work to Occidental,” Lyke said.
Rather than merely seeing her work as a part of Veitch’s inauguration, Lyke hopes that the area surrounding her piece will become a peaceful place on campus where students can simply reflect on what Occidental is built on and what it still has to offer.
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