Two of the paintings in Jill Eggers' exhibit at Grand Valley State University are accompanied by excerpts from a recent poem by Michigan native Jim Harrison. Another painting borrows the title of a recent Harrison novel. They are among more than 20 pieces on display in an exhibition that blends the artist's visual experience with her emotional and subjective experience of the world.
The exhibition, "Returning to Earth," will run August 28 through September 25. There will be an opening reception with the artist on Thursday, September 10 from 5-7 p.m. The exhibition and reception are free and open to the public.
Eggers is an associate professor of painting at Grand Valley and head of the painting program. She received her MFA from Yale University. Her work is exhibited nationally and held in private and public collections.
"Harrison's influence on my work is based on landscape as the nexus of the relation of the inner life to the outer, or the spiritual to the material," said Eggers. "I borrowed the exhibition title from Harrison's novel. My painting by that title came from images I took in Michigan's Upper Peninsula where a significant scene in the novel takes place."
Two other paintings were influenced by Harrison's poem, "The Golden Window," and are displayed with excerpts. They were born from ideas gathered in a thicket planted by Harrison's mother on the family farm near Rodney, Michigan. Eggers accompanied Harrison there during one of his annual visits to Grand Valley. "Harrison's sister lives there now, and she and her husband have generously allowed me to paint and photograph on their land," said Eggers.
Eggers' exhibition paintings, which range in size from 12-by-12 inches to as large as five feet, are done in oil on canvas, mostly from the last three years. During this time her work shifted in subject matter and method. The more recent paintings are based on the landscape, specifically the dense and lyrical woods of Michigan. The smaller paintings precede the large landscapes and ask questions about the nature of desire and consciousness.
"Other painters and visual artists have had a significant and lasting influence on my work," said Eggers. "Other writers, too, like Tolstoy, Gogol, and most vividly, Vladimir Nabokov, were also influential."
The GVSU Art Gallery is located in the Performing Arts Center, 1
Campus Drive, on the Allendale Campus. Parking is available in the
Kirkhof lot. For more information call the GVSU Art Gallery at (616) 331-2563.
