USM Alumni News, Spring 1997, pp 11-13

Sharon Spell's mother worried when her daughter decided on a career as an artist.

"I could just see her starving in a garret somewhere." Ruth Spell, a Hattiesburg artist and former art teacher said when Sharon left for Pittsburgh, Pa., following her graduation from USM in the Spring of 1995.

Armed with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, a willingness to take whatever work she could find, an articulate tongue and youthful self confidence, Spell set out to conquer the Pittsburgh art world.

Less than two years later, she has made a good start. She has jobs at the Carnegie Museum of Art and the Andy Warhol Museum and is the interim Juried Visual Arts Coordinator at the Three Rivers Arts Festival. Spell, 24, has had her own solo art show and has paintings hanging in two prestigious galleries: the Concept Art Gallery (which, she said, carries mostly fine art) and the View From Zenith Gallery, where she and another artist had a show Feb. 28-March 30.

She has sold a number of paintings and gotten commissions to do others. Most of her paintings, she said, are in a style similar to that of her mural that hangs in USM's R.C. Cook Student Union building - "Figural and textural--expressionistic."

But like most other aspiring artists, her first job in Pittsburgh was doing something else. In Spell's case, it was working at a coffee house.

Only two months after she arrived in Pittsburgh, however, opportunity knocked.

"The artist who was supposed to have a show there (at the coffee house) didn't show up. I said, ...'Well, I just happen to have some paintings in my car.' ...So they let me do the show instead."

A friend of Pittsburgh artist Robert Qualters saw the show. He put Spell in touch with Qualters, who hired Spell as his studio assistant on a project for which he had been commissioned -- to paint banners on plywood for the city of Homestead.

"He really taught me a lot and helped me with some contacts," said Spell.

Those contacts led to other jobs. Now Spell says she's working about 50 hours a week in her three art jobs -- all of which come under the umbrella of the Carnegie Institute.

As a museum teacher at the Carnegie Museum of Art's Children's Studio Program --"The Art Connection," she teaches two classes of fifth grade students every Saturday. She said the museum's Saturday art classes for preschool through high school ages "are a longstanding tradition, and many students (such as Andy Warhol and Philip Pearlstein) go on to have successful careers in the arts."

Spell teaches her students "pretty much the things I learned in college -- drawing, painting, print making..." She uses hands-on projects to let the students experience different art forms.

She also is a museum teacher at the Andy Warhol Museum in a program called "The Weekend Factory," which, unlike the Carnegie program, is for all ages.

"If you visit it, you can make art the way Warhol did," she said. "He started out as a commercial artist, then applied those techniques to fine art. He was the first person to screen print on canvas, and we do some of that."

She said the "Weekend Factory," which is open on Saturdays and Sundays, "is not a structured class. People who come to the museum can come and go." She also works in the museum's education resource center.

At the Three Rivers Arts Festival, Spell is responsible for the juried art entries for the festival, which exhibits selected works in several downtown locales. She also is in charge of children's arts programing.

"Children can come an do one of four or five projects we have going," she said. "Last year, Kathy Pope (Of Hattiesburg, USM '73) sent me a book on "Hanimals" -- animals painted on their hands. We did that. And I call Mom a lot for ideas, too."

Spell said she was not always so focused on her art.

I had a struggle with my work at USM," She said, "But they gave me a good foundation. I was busy with other things, and it took me a while to find my voice in my art."

Still, some of those other things, such as serving on the Union Board, "really taught me how to manage my time and communicate what I needed. I had to learn what was important in my painting. I really just started to focus on painting my last semester."

Now, She's just finished a month-long show, with artist Michael Pizzulo, in Pittsburgh. A large crowd attended the gala opening of the show, and, she said excitedly, "I sold five pictures."

Spell is keeping her options open for the future.

"I'd like to go back to school and get some more tools to make art with. Some artists are making interactive CD-ROMs and doing other innovative things."

In the meantime, she's a long way from starving in a garret.

"I can't complain," she said. "I have a better life than I could ever have imagined." USM

A plaque beside the mural reads: Sharon Spell, Center for International Education Mural Project, On Tem-porary Loan, Alkyd Oil on Marine Plywood, 1995.

Spell wrote in an explanation of the painting, done for her Honors College thesis, (the painting, not the writing, was her thesis, she stressed.) that "In the summer of 1993, Dr. Tim Hudson, dean of the College of International (and Continuing) Education, commissioned me to produce a mural for the building that houses his offices as well as the English Language Institute."

Spell's faculty advisor, art professor Bill Baggett, helped her plan the project. Earlier, working with Baggett on the "Spirit That Builds" mural for the Hattiesburg PUblic Library taught her a great deal, she said, about planning and executing such a large project.

From the beginning she knew what she wanted to accomplish.

"I wanted to depict a universal human. I wanted to make figures which could represent all people and with whom all people could identify. But it is a dangerous task to try to unify a body of people, for one often erases certain diversities. What's worse, when I did try this, the resulting image looked more alien than human."

Several false starts later, Spell found her solution. Drawing her inspiration from the works of artists Jean Dubuffet and Jackson Pollock, she said, "I changed my approach to the project from subject matter to surface. I made the texture first, and the imagery came later."

She dripped the paint onto the surface, stepped on it, repeated the process and scraped with a palate knife to even out the paint. Then, she said, she "made shapes and textures, destroyed them, then built on their ruins to find the resulting human forms emerging from their environment...

"The result was something I couldn't have realized in any moment of preconception. And it was in fact the very thing I wanted to create all along: figures that read as human yet do not identify themselves with any particular set of humans."

Nearly two years after the project was commissioned, Spell and her father Joe mounted the two 12-foot by 4 foot, 175 pound murals -- each with three triptychs (sets of panels) of two figures -- onto frames. She applied a protective coating, since they were to be hung on an outside wall of the ELI. Then she graduated and left to seek her fortune in Pittsburgh, Pa.

So why has the mural been hung -- two years later -- in the Student Union Building?

In the interim, the mural was stored. When Michael DeMarsche arrived this year as the new curator of USM's C.W. Woods Art Gallery, he took the mural out of storage. There being no new International Education building in sign, he, Union Director Barbara Ross and Honors College Dean Marueen Ryan worked together to get the mural hung -- as it turned out -- in the Union.

Hudson is confident, though, that someday it will hang in a new International Education Building, artistically capturing the spirit of his program.

"We should be gender/ethnically blind," he said. "That's the whole purpose of international Education. I think this mural communicates that very well."

Maybe a building called the "Student Union" is an appropriate place for it after all.