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The walls of the first floor of the Shaffer Art Building were filled with bright greens, warm yellows, dark browns and robots. The pictures showed celebrations of people, cultures and ducks. The posters that invited visitors toward the exhibit showed a beautiful, full sun lighting up a serene forest in which an idyllic house sits while on fire.

On May 2, seniors of the illustration bachelor’s in fine arts will exhibit their work as a part of their senior thesis project. The exhibition, entitled “Cabin Fever,” draws on the group’s love of nature and camping, as well as their feelings of being stuck inside post-pandemic. Ben Palumbo likened their feelings to an image of an outwards explosion.

“The idea of ‘Cabin Fever’ was that potential energy buildup, like when you shake up a soda bottle,” Palumbo said. “Just like raring to do things and collaborate after just being cooped up inside for so long. It had us itching to do things and get out there, so now this is like that explosion of creative possibility that finally gets released after that buildup.”

Usually, illustration majors, like other art majors, end their college career with a senior thesis project, Jenny Katz said. These projects are usually stressful and require professors to heavily examine students’ work alone in a room.

But with this exhibition, Katz said one of the best parts has been the ability to have a pure celebration of their work and effort in the major.

“It’s nice to actually have something that at the end of the senior semester that I’m looking forward to in terms of like, this is a celebration of us as illustrators and the group of people and our artwork, and it’s not for a grade,” Katz said.

Katz also spoke to the range of the major itself. Illustration allows people with all kinds of interests to come together and create with their own ideas and backgrounds.

Katz, who was drawn to illustration after seeing the concept art for “Shrek” in high school, said that an interesting aspect of this exhibition has been how everyone used their personal interests and skills to come together for this project.

“There’s these little pockets … these are the girls who do most of the editorial stuff, (Palumbo and I) do a lot of the entertainment and visual development stuff,” Katz said. “So it’s nice, for the first time in our careers, to have something where it’s literally the whole class, we’re all deciding what that color palette is, what we want to put into it, the message we’re putting across.”

This approach to illustration also drew in Xinjin Xu, a former education major. But after realizing she could use her love of painting and drawing to bring education and joy to others, she decided to become an illustration major.

Xu said she wants to use her watercolor paintings and drawings to illustrate fairy tales and children’s books, and she sees illustration as a wonderfully diverse major that allows for a lot of different approaches and artistic mediums.

“People just use digital illustration for faster-speed business, but my personal kind of love about the traditional media, the watercolor, is about what color that pigment can flow with the water,” Xu said. “Those textures that suddenly happen feed what I want to express about my delicate and beautiful culture.”

Meet Xinjin
“Xinjin Xu is an illustrator, designer, and watercolor artist, and will earn her BFA in Illustration from the Syracuse University of Art in 2022. Publishing, design, and editorial are three directions she wants to get into. She uses colorful, delicate, and detailed illustrations to capture the beauty of the world around her. Her drawings and illustrations are inspired by nature, fantasy stories, social issues, traditional Chinese culture, and small, lovely things in her life. She always has a child’s heart and believes in the existence of magic!” :sparkles::leaves:

A photo posted by cabinfeversu

Noah Lane said he enjoyed the collaborative aspect of the exhibition. The exhibition was special because the pandemic and quarantine had made college difficult for him, he said, so this exhibition was a great creative outlet.

Lane, who loves to draw machinery and robots, said that the whole class — which is made up of only 18 seniors — truly came together for the first time to create this exhibition.

“It’s kind of funny, because when we had our first meeting about this exhibition, we were all talking to gather, like the professor wasn’t even there. It was just all on,” Lane said. “We’ve known each other for four years, but we’ve never actually really interacted as a full group for those four years.”

“Cabin Fever” will be the first exhibition that illustration majors have ever put on. This creates a special craving to make something that lives longer than 2022’s seniors, Ally Manziano said.

Manziano sees this as an excellent opportunity to not only celebrate themselves, but also as an addition to their resume and prowess in the art world.

“It was just really awesome to get together, and now it’s something that we can put on our portfolio — that we’ve been in an exhibition.” Manziano said. “We branded it, we created it, we presented it. It’s cool to have that under our belt for future exhibitions that we may apply to or get into.”

The exhibition began on May 2 and will continue until May 15. There will be a ceremony for the exhibition on May 6 to give a formal presentation to all guests present.

As the exhibition brings these artists with different interests and life goals together, Palumbo said that the best part of this exhibition will be the simple fact that the exhibition will encapsulate what illustration art is all about.

“You know, an artist’s work is never done,” Palumbo said. “You can always improve upon it but it’s nice to take a second to be able to appreciate and show why we do it. We want to show other people that illustration is art you make to entertain other people and to speak to other people.”

Published on May 2, 2022 at 9:50 pm