Campus Sculpture Tour

Signe Stuart

SCENIC, 1998
Mixed media, canvas
80 x 108 x 12 inches
Gift of the artist in honor of Grinnell students

Highly linear, Scenic invites the viewer to meditate on its combinations of shifting textures and developed forms. Carefully balanced, Signe Stuart’s mixed media piece maintains structure and grace. Scenic, comprised of two canvas panels and two ladder-like frames, extends from the wall in the rotunda of Bucksbaum Center for the Arts. The slender wood frames cast shadows that slide behind and beyond the canvas, adding soft edges to the complex linearity of Scenic. The lines of the canvases, some stitched and some painted, interact on many planes. Horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines all appear, alternating from yellow to white in each canvas. The lines cross at regular intervals to form parallelograms. While the lines form standard shapes, the lines themselves change. Some protrude, while others appear recessed. In the upper sections of the canvas, charged vertical scratches emerge from a sandy background. Toward the lower portion, smooth panels rise up—in lines of their own—to meet the sandy sections. Though present in many forms, these lines all play multiple roles: they add form, they delineate shapes, and they define a rich background.

As seen in her use of line, Stuart intends for her pieces to display both the order and unruliness of nature. “My pieces open dialogues about the space of Nature and the nature of space,” she writes. “They are intended as meditations, evoking Nature’s underlying interconnectedness and expressing the dynamic harmony between the fragile and the powerful, the psychic and the physical, the moment and timelessness” (artist statement). Stuart’s artistic process mimics the concept of meditation in its careful consideration. She considers herself a “constructivist painter” (artist statement) and painstakingly sews, arranges, and glazes her canvas until she forms a new structure. Ultimately, Stuart expresses a simple—though not easily attainable—goal for her art. Though she meditates on nature, she hopes to move toward the mystical. “I want to make paintings that are beautiful,” she writes. “I believe the Beautiful elicits feelings of wholeness and at-one-ment. Perhaps I am trying to paint versions of paradise.”

About the Artist: Born in New London, Conn., artist Signe Stuart currently resides in Santa Fe, N.M., after a career spent in the Midwest. Stuart earned a B.A. from the University of Connecticut (1959) and an M.A. from the University of New Mexico (1961). In 1994 she was named Professor Emerita of the Department of Visual Arts, South Dakota State University. Her detailed canvases have been shown in exhibitions throughout the United States, and her work is in many public and corporate collections. Her work was displayed in Faulconer Gallery’s Patient Process exhibition in 2001, and she also taught a special course at the College that same year, “Experiments in Art: Paper as Medium and Metaphor.” Her daughter is an alumna of the College.

Essay by Christine Hancock ‘06
2006