Editor’s note: This article was initially published in The Daily Gazette, Swarthmore’s online, daily newspaper founded in Fall 1996. As of Fall 2018, the DG has merged with The Phoenix. See the about page to read more about the DG.
This past Friday, Katia Lom’s senior art exhibition opened so that the Swarthmore community could get a glimpse at select projects she has created over the course of the past year. Horses and portraiture are the subjects of most of the paintings and sculptures displayed. The exhibit will be open from 12 until 5 in the evening on today and can also be viewed by request of the artist.
“The show is a culmination of the work that we’ve done over a whole year. I didn’t think of creating a single theme, I just wanted to take a year to experiment and work alone,” explains Lom. Lom, an art and dance major (she recently received the Troy award for dance composition), has created beautiful, vivid pieces marked by what appears to be a thick strokes and intense attention to the power of shadows both on page and in three dimensions.
Her portraits pop from the page with intense line and lighting while her horses more gently meld into broad, richly colored landscapes. While the figures were all based on modeling, the horses came from Lom’s imagination. “The horses happened by accident,” she states, “I was working on portraiture all of fall semester and needed a break.”
Katia Lom’s instincts as a dancer and choreographer clearly serve her well in the visual art she has created. She explains that one of the principal issues on her mind was the use of space: “It’s more choreographed.” She hopes to continue with both dance choreography and the fine arts by pursuing art school after graduation. “I don’t want to make a choice yet, but the ideal would be to do both,” she says. As the pieces in the exhibit show, the fusion of her love of the human figure and her knowledge of the stage results in bold and skillfully wrought works.
