URI professor recreates marine artwork

11/07/08 - For some people, art is a means to escape reality; for artist and educator David Wheeler, it is a portal to the past. Wheeler, a marine science illustrator with 25 years of artistic experience, aims to recreate prehistoric artwork that depicts marine life. The exhibit, which began Sunday will run until the end of this month. Eleven of his works will be on display in the gallery at the University of Rhode Island's library.

An autobiographical excerpt placed near his mounted artwork said Wheeler aims to "experience the primordial impulse, to feel in my own hands the act of early mark making."

His exhibit, entitled "Primordial Tides: Sea Life in the Art of Prehistoric Peoples," includes works created with watercolor pencils, crayons, watercolors, oil pastels and colored inks. His drawings were designed with technical pens on illustration boards.

"It's pretty good, I wish I could do art like that actually," said Nicole Sutherlin, a freshman majoring in business and marketing. The artwork "gets you away from the feeling of being in a library, so you don't have to feel like it's all about work," she said.

The first of his 11 works is a black and white drawing composed of brisk pen strokes, the occasional cluster of dots and series of miniature diamonds. In the drawing, six men diligently work aboard a wooden-planked ship, sorting their daily catches. The individual figures are drawn in precise positions, each with his head bent downwards towards the deck.

In front of them lie various containers filled with organisms ranging from crabs, fish, and shells of various shapes and sizes. The drawing is titled, "The New York Zoological Society's First Oceanographic Expedition, After Ernest Schoedsack."

In the foreground of the second drawing, the portrait of a man stares out at the onlooker. His portrait appears to date him somewhere around his mid-fifties with a receding hairline and wrinkles that crease his forehead. He wears a plaid shirt, slightly unbuttoned just below his neck, and noticeable bags shadow his eyes.

In the background, a tugboat battles the waves of a rough day at sea and a dark figure breaks through the rough waters, exposing itself to the openness of the drawing. The various pen strokes the artist used creates texture and gives depth to the piece.

A dark background with white flecks gives a sense of mysteriousness to Wheeler's third black and white drawing. An enormous, seven-tentacled octopus creeps into the picture from the bottom left corner.

"It is easy to remember when we were small and lay on our stomachs beside a tide pool and our minds and eyes went so deeply into it that size and identity were lost," the caption below said.

Unlike the black and white pieces preceding it, the fourth composition is unique to his collection in that it is both colorful and contains prominent geometric shapes. The middle ground portrays a Moon snail, which appears to be traveling along a galactic Milky Way-like figure. Above and below this abstractedness are 12 individual square drawings.

To the right of this piece is a depiction of a series of six cave paintings. Orange, umber and brown are the dominant hues in this painting, while hints of subtle yellows, blacks, and whites peek out.

"I painted these pictures- illustrations of world cave paintings- not to create fine art or copy from others, but to experience the techniques the ancients evolved, the strokes and gestures the artists recorded, and the various arrangements of figures, and the various arrangements of figures and forms," Wheeler said.

Warm pastel hues give birth to a large fish profile in the sixth of Wheeler's prehistoric-themed works. Splayed upon a background of pale, translucent colors, the painting appears to shimmer.

Several of the five remaining paintings of Wheeler's displayed artwork provide captions that relate the painting to the history of the original artwork that inspired it.

The exhibit will be open Sunday from 1 p.m. to 11:30 p.m.; Monday through Thursday, 8 a.m. to 11:30 p.m.; Friday, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.; and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.