The Visual Arts Gallery held a reception for the Alumni Art Exhibit on Friday Jan. 14, allowing the artists a chance to talk about their work and life after Mt. Hood Community College.

Diane Hester’s piece “We Are People Too…” is an emotional piece that took months to create. “This was a huge project for me my last year at Marylhurst,” Hester said.
Hester said the piece is an effort to call attention to society’s treatment of the homeless. “People tend to overlook, ignore, walk by and pretend we don’t see,” she said.

Also in the show are Hester’s woodblock prints of athletes, titled “Coloring Outside the Lines”. She describes her style as “simplified drawing with big blocks of color.”

MHCC alumnae Jeanette Pelster’s color photos of Oregon landscapes show lots of space and shades of gray. Her photo “Lincoln City Shoreline” is an image of an empty beach on a cloudy day.

The piece “Deschutes River” shows rolling hills going up to a sky that seems on the verge of bursting open. Pelster says, “You‘ve got to get out there on the dreary days. You’d be surprised at the beautiful things to see.”

Christine Singer’s painting titled “Art Womb 1” pays homage to MHCC. The painting shows the zip code 97030, which is the zip code of the college. Her mixed media piece “Lifeline” shows golden paint dripping like caramel over the canvas, with pieces of amber affixed to the canvas as well. If the viewer looks closely, they can find a surprise embedded in the amber.

Alumnus Tom Engstrom’s paintings “Orange Ephemeral No. 1” and “Destination” are abstracts that Engstrom paints from photographs and found images of the sky and ocean. He says, “Sometimes I’ll combine images, take the form from one thing and the colors from another.” He tries to “keep the composition simple, find a rhythm.” Engstrom has started stretching his own canvasses, he says, to have control over yet another element of the creative process.

The Alumni Art show continues through Jan. 26.