Cover art: Creating community

Abstract

Artist Statement: "Creating Community" is a colored pencil drawing illustrating the history of Fresno Pacific University. The composition began as an adaptation of a large-scale oil painting by Rodney Harder using his vocabulary of color, shape, and texture as a starting point, then altering the blue, green, red, and lavender pallet and incorporating elements from promotional photographs of the Fresno Pacific campus. The left side of the image (on the back cover of the issue) depicts the four FPU campus centers: Visalia, North Fresno, Bakersfield, and Merced.

The campus centers are divided by two intersecting white lines to create a cross, symbolizing the FPU Idea of the Christian University. The left-center area of the composition (also on the back cover) is a combination of abstracted figurative silhouettes leading towards a stained glass window, like a congregation gathering at church. The right half (on the front cover) embodies the FPU Idea concept of the Community of Learners through the interaction of two students sharing a textbook. The right-most area depicts the changing sights of the Main Campus: cypress trees, Sattler Hall, McDonald Hall, and the terraced seating of the former amphitheater which no longer exists. Above the seated figures is a swinging pendulum: both a literal reference to AIMS Hall’s Foucault’s Pendulum and a metaphor for the steady clock-like swinging of time.