ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, April 21, 1997 TAG: 9704210110
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE THE ROANOKE TIMES
THEY MAY never grace Grandma's parlor, these portraits.
Not with their multiple eyes, their pencil noses. Their fingers-in-the-light-socket hair.
When David Webster - an English artist teaching at Virginia Western Community College for a year - set out to draw his Roanoke students, he worked from the inside out. The results - part caricature, part ink blot test, and eerily on target - are featured in "A Roll of the Dice," Webster's current exhibition in the school's Humanities Building Art Gallery.
The show, which includes paintings, prints and multimedia drawings, is based on Webster's impressions of Roanoke during the past year.
Should anyone be in doubt, he likes it here just fine.
"Roanoke is great," he said. "It's big enough to be interesting but small enough not to be overpowering. I've really enjoyed the whole town."
Webster, who back home teaches art at England's Southport College, near Liverpool on the Irish Sea, swapped places with Virginia Western art professor David Curtis for the year, as part of an exchange program for Fulbright scholars. Curtis has been in Southport since fall teaching Webster's classes - while Webster took over Curtis' classes here in drawing and print-making.
Webster applied for the program knowing he could end up anywhere - Fulbright scholars from England have been known to land in Hawaii. Decisions are made based on where a suitable position is available, he said.
He was a little apprehensive. On a previous exchange, the Englishman found himself in a tiny West Virginia hamlet that redefined for him the meaning of "culture shock."
"Initially, I couldn't believe how slow the pace of life was," he said - though he also said "I had a great time."
Still, when he got a letter this time telling him he was headed for Roanoke, Webster didn't know what to expect, though he had heard the name.
"I didn't know whether it was a river or a mountain or a city or an island," said Webster (the word ``Roanoke,'' of course, applies to all four). "I just knew it sounded familiar."
City it was - and a good one, by Webster's reckoning.
"Everybody's really positive, upbeat about things," said Webster - who noted the climate in England is currently one of economic uncertainty. Proposed cuts in higher education have even made him fearful for his own job when he goes back.
Here, "People still have the idea that if you work hard, you'll do well," said Webster, 46.
In any event, his exhibit offers viewers a variety of first impressions - from the personalities of his students to the brilliance of the Appalachian fall. "The colors are just so intense," he said of the latter.
A series of his linoleum block prints, meanwhile, explores some patterns in American life that natives may take for granted. In "Big Lazy Buick," Webster makes an abstract artwork out of the endless curves and circles he has noticed over and over again in the design of David Curtis' big Buick - in the steering wheel, clock, dial, wheel and engine. Back home, Webster drives an MG.
The two art professors have swapped cars along with homes and classes.
Another series of prints is drawn from natural shapes - after all, it is partly nature, crowding the city's borders, that makes Roanoke seem so different from Webster's long-settled island home.
Nature, like Buick makers, tends to use the same pattern over and over again, said Webster, whose prints are dense with interlacing vine and seed shapes. "Even under a microscope, in nature the same things keep turning up all the time."
The exhibit also includes a drawing of a soccer game - "football" to Europeans - in which a young woman seems to be attacking the ball and the opposing (male) player, both at once.
Webster said the aggressiveness of female soccer players on this side of the ocean has amazed him. "I've never seen girls play this way," he said.
The drawing is titled "Dynamism of Wennerstrom" - after Virginia Western student Jill Wennerstrom.
It is the portraits, though, that catch and hold the eye.
By turns charming and disturbing - and not entirely flattering - Webster has used everything from charcoal to oil to crayon, even making use of the students' own drawing styles to get at their personalities.
Moving down the line of mounted portraits, Webster talked about the students he had painted, one by one.
There was Joel Gill. "He's way up-front. Very direct," Webster said. And Eric Childress. "He's got a very sort of dry humor. ... Sonny [Nelson ``Sonny'' Tolley] is a great thinker about things. He'll ponder over things for a while until he decides how to do them.
"Paul [Paul Caldwell] is a very outgoing character. Very very pleasant. He cheers people up. He could eat a horse."
And that one?
"Attentiveness," said Webster of Beth Deel, whom he painted with four eyes. "Softness. Energy." Deel, said Webster, seemed to pay complete attention to every word he said.
The reason may have had something to do with Webster's lilting, Liverpudlian delivery.
"I think in the beginning we were all listening to the way he talked rather than what he was saying," confirmed Deel, who came to the gallery a few days afterward to talk to a reporter.
Asked about this, Webster - who says things like "proe-ject" (to describe a complex task) and "buke" (for the things in libraries) - replied:
"I haven't got the accent. You have the accent."
In any event, something of Deel does seem to emerge in Webster's portrait of her, in which a staring, elongated face is almost literally all eyes.
"I do try to see things really, rather than just look at them," said Deel, a Roanoker who will study next year at the Kansas City Art Institute. "I have pretty big eyes."
Meanwhile, Caldwell's portrait, drawn from a photo of a class outing to an Italian restaurant, caught him perfectly, she believes. "We say, 'This is Paul begging for one more breadstick,''' she teased.
"It resembles me somewhat," Caldwell admitted.
Did it capture his personality?
"All the way."
Webster's own favorite is of student Andy Simmons, whose portrait adorns - so to speak - fliers about the exhibition. "Andy is very much in your face," Webster said of his electric portrait of an open-mouthed young man whose very hair stands on end. "Very direct. Very definite views about things. ... I really like this one best of all. The sharp contrasts and the hard edges of the things."
Simmons, a little surprisingly, seems to have taken no offense.
"He matched our personalities real good, I think," Simmons said. "I really wasn't expecting it. He seems to think I'm full of energy."
Simmons conceded he used to be a little "hyper."
"I've since calmed down," he said.
Webster, all of whose exhibit work is for sale, made the portraits available to the students for $30 - a price he said covered little more than the frame. Simmons was the only one who didn't take advantage of the bargain.
His portrait has since been sold elsewhere - but the student didn't seem to think he'd missed an opportunity.
"I've got a Xeroxed copy of it," Simmons said. "So, I'm cool."
``A Roll of the Dice,'' on view through Friday in the Humanities Building Art Gallery, Virginia Western Community College, Roanoke.
LENGTH: Long : 142 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. JANEL RHODA THE ROANOKE TIMES Virginia Western artby CNBstudent Paul Caldwell says his portrait by professor David Webster
captures his outgoing personality ``all the way.'' color
2. JANEL RHODA THE ROANOKE TIMES Visiting Fulbright scholar David
Webster looks over Krystal Lundy's work during a drawing class at
Virginia Western Community College. Student Andy Simmons is the
subject of the portrait on the flyer (inset) that advertises
Webster's exhibit. color
3. JANEL RHODA THE ROANOKE TIMES In art student Beth Deel's portait,
Webster wanted to capture her attentiveness, softness and energy.