FAU Exhibition to Feature Paintings by Walter Hnatysh and Ceramics by John McCoy

BOCA RATON, FL (October 11, 2004) - The University Galleries in Florida Atlantic University's School of the Arts will present the exhibition Walter Hnatysh & John McCoy: Spirits Kindred, Adventures in Academia from October 22 through November 20 in the Ritter Art Gallery on the Boca Raton campus, 777 Glades Road. There will be an opening reception for the artists on Thursday, October 21 from 7 to 9 p.m. The exhibition and the opening reception are free and open to the public.

Walter Hnatysh and John McCoy are both professors in the Department of Visual Arts and Art History at FAU. Hnatysh is a painter, while McCoy is a potter. Both artists are concerned that contemporary art teaching and practice often value concepts or ideas over visual results and technical skills or craft. Their works, although very different in appearance, share an adherence to traditional techniques and they succeed in attaining the highest level of craftsmanship.

For this exhibition Hnatysh will present many new drawings that he developed and completed during a recent one-year sabbatical from teaching. Instead of the saturated colors that characterize his paintings, these drawings are mostly black and white and several have been made on black paper. Hnatysh's skill as a draftsman shows in these drawings that equal the size of paintings. His images come from a variety of sources including life, his imagination and dreams. Many of the drawings picture a world close to or under water and creatures that inhabit these spaces might be amphibious or be part human and part animal. As surreal as his images seem, Hnatysh grounds these new drawings in a technique that brings to mind the drawings of the old masters.

McCoy's contribution to the exhibition includes several sets of utilitarian ceramic pots that demonstrate his mastery of wheel forming clay. They also demonstrate his interest and delight in subjecting these seemingly perfect forms to hand-fed, wood-fired kilns that are subject to unpredictable results and surprises. While McCoy could choose to work with kinds of kilns that are predictable in their results, he and a number of other ceramic artists who share his philosophy prefer to subject their forms to kilns that create hard to predict but sometimes spectacular results. For McCoy great results often mean a beautifully shaped vessel that has a permanently embedded drip formation that decorates the skin of the pot and testifies to the extreme heat it underwent in the firing. By subjecting his pots to chance and surprise, McCoy provides an uncontrollable, perhaps spiritual, dimension to his work that would not be possible if he dictated all aspects of his art's production.

The Ritter Art Gallery, which is located in FAU's Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters, is open to the public Tuesday through Friday, 1 to 4 pm and Saturday, 1 to 5 pm. Group tours are welcome and can be arranged at alternative hours. University Galleries exhibitions and programs are supported in part by grants from the Bank of America; the Palm Beach County Cultural Council; Florida Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs; the Florida Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts; FAU Student Government through student activity fees; the Ritter Family Foundation; and private contributions. For further information about the exhibition, please call the University Galleries at 561-297-2966 or visit www.fau.edu/galleries.

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