Artist Spotlight

Sophomore Alysa Obert, a communication arts major, wrote about one aspect of her Gordon in Lynn experience for the Languages and Linguistics Department’s fall newsletter:
“I do not consider myself an artist. I’ve never taken an art class and although on occasion I might get a creative burst, these moments are few and far between. Often I find myself stuffing the images and pictures in my head into little black words on a blank page. However, last semester I discovered something I have termed an “everyday epiphany”: some experiences transcend words. I do not mean they are unable to be communicated, but that words do not do so adequately. A wise friend told me thoughts are not necessarily in words, so I decided to paint what I thought.
“This painting (left) took me a while to complete. There were many, many layers and it changed quite a bit because I struggled to express what I had learned. Besides the paint itself, most of the elements I used found me. The glass was sitting outside of Lane, and the chain was on the ground in a Lynn parking lot. The use of oil paint was also specific to symbolize the density and the texture of the issue of immigration. I used complementary colors to draw stark contrasts that I saw apparent in my experiences in Lynn and at Gordon, and I used pieces of trash to express some of the polluted thought I saw in Lynn in the issue of immigration and in academia as well.
“As I reflect on my experience in Lynn, I have only begun to realize the imprint it has made on my heart. Lynn has helped me engage the terms of duty, service, mercy, justice and suffering in the context of an omnipotent God by grounding what I learned in theory in the reality of experience.”