For the culminating project of my four years of undergraduate study at Willamette University, I chose to paint portraits of the professors of the art and art history department.  I was inspired to do this for two reasons:

1) Though my focus had been portraits for a few years already, I had only been making portraits of family members—and with some of them, like my grandfather, I was doing so repeatedly!  I needed to know before I entered into the real world whether or not I could make the likeness of someone who didn’t have my family’s features.

2) I had heard that the professors were wicked mean in senior seminar critiques.  While that turned out to be a gross exaggeration, I knew that I wanted to involve the professors in the critique process in a new way.  By painting their portraits, I made them the subject of their own evaluation, complicating the already convoluted psychology of a critique.

Professor Grew’s portrait is not the only painting from that series on this site.  See what I made of Hess, Roger Hull, Jill Greenwood, James Thompson, and Andrea Wallace as well.

For more information about Heidi Preuss Grew and the work she does, please visit www.heidigrew.com.