The walls of the central atrium are covered from floor to ceiling with the works of students in Guilford’s arts program. Paintings, prints, drawings, photographs and sculptures all serve as a vibrant testament to the creativity and technical skill of the students who attend class in the adjoining rooms.
One painting hung in a golden frame on the far left of the room, is particularly mesmerizing. The piece centers on two enigmatic figures, set against a dark backdrop with a sky-colored opening in the center.
The figure in the foreground is fluid and shadowlike, caught in mid-motion. The one in the background has a hyper-defined torso, but his head and lower body are consumed by the same feathery abstractions as the other.
The rich golds and blues and the contrast of light and dark bring to mind themes of duality and give the work an almost mythological air. At the same time, the smoky grays and chaotic motion in the composition contribute to a feeling of surrealism, like a still frame from the mind’s subconscious.
The painting is called “Self Contrasted by False Ideals” and it was completed in 2022 by Guilford student Will Decareaux, a third-year fine arts major. For Decareaux, the idea that eventually turned into the painting started out simply as the idea of motion.
“I was playing with ideas of what motion looks like in a painting,” says Decareaux, “and I was trying to think, ‘where do I exhibit motion in everyday life?’”
In order to begin the process, Decareaux took reference pictures of himself in various stages of motion. He then ran the photos through some AI filters to help him develop some of the abstractions seen in the final product, a method that has become increasingly common among visual artists in recent years.
“There’s still a lot of stigma around it, and understandably,” Decareaux said of using AI. “But ultimately, it is a tool, and I see artists using it in unique ways . . . it’s a part of this long, collaborative process.”
Next, Decareaux traced the pictures and added his own details, such as the shadow cast by the foreground figure. Then, he began to paint. Some details translated easily from concept to canvas; others less so. The well-defined torso of one figure, for example, took weeks to perfect.
“At the time, I couldn’t do that sort of thing with paint, the hyper-realistic stuff,” Decareaux recalls, “so I’d paint it and wipe it away because it just didn’t look right. I painted it over and over and over again. I was obsessed with getting it right.”
Eventually, he did get to a point where he was satisfied, both with the figure and the work as a whole. It was important for him the piece to not just be visually striking, but thematically meaningful. In the past, some of his works had been less personal, and more about exploring visual concepts.
“I wanted part of me to be visible in this one,” Decareaux explained. The mysterious figures, he said, both represent himself: the shadowy foreground figure representing his “unfinished” current form, and the defined figure in the background representing an unattainable “idealized” version of himself. The lack of a shadow cast by the idealized figure reveals it as false — the “false ideal” the title of the painting refers to.
At Guilford, the process of making art is intensively collaborative. Art majors take courses in various mediums, including ceramics, welding, photography, printmaking, painting and more. Artists bounce ideas off of each other and their professors, a dynamic Decareaux credits as having helped him immensely throughout his time at Guilford.
“If I’m unsure about something, I might just show my friends my artwork and be like ‘What’s your takeaway on this? What do you get from this?’” he said.
Collaborative spirit is a huge part of what makes visual art such a unique discipline, but it’s also a huge part of what makes Guilford College such a unique place. This is seen in full at Hege-Cox Hall, where every one of the dozens of works on display has as compelling a story behind them as “Self Contrasted.”
