With works from almost five decades, a retrospective exhibit featuring Northwestern art professor Rein Vanderhill entitled “48 Years Making Images” is on display in Te Paske Gallery.
Showing from Sept. 3 through Oct. 13, Vanderhill’s show contains prints and paintings from 1962 to present. The prints contain etchings, engravings, lithographs and wood carvings. The paintings are watercolor on paper and oil or acrylic on canvas. The subjects and styles of these vary drastically from abstract paintings done back in graduate school to prints of places and people to the beaches of Lake Michigan.
The best known paintings in Vanderhill’s vast collection include enlarged representations of small parts of nature, typically fruits or flowers. These are done using intense colors and high contrasts to emphasize the shadows and negative spaces.
Vanderhill has worked at NW for 36 years. Before coming here, he was an instructor at Muskegon Community College in Michigan for three years before earning a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich.
The exhibit is one in a long line of both solo and group expeditions throughout the area. Furthermore, pieces of Vanderhill’s work are on permanent display in Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, South Dakota and Wisconsin.
