Professor to display retrospective of his artwork

Northwestern College art professor Rein Vanderhill will display a retrospective exhibit of his artwork, entitled “48 Years Making Images,” Sept. 3 through Oct. 13 in the college’s Te Paske Gallery. A public reception is scheduled for Friday, Sept. 3, at 7 p.m.

Vanderhill’s show will include prints and paintings created between 1962 and 2010. Etchings and engravings, as well as woodcut reliefs and lithographs, compose the prints. The paintings are watercolor on paper and acrylic or oil on canvas. The subjects and styles vary, from abstract paintings of bicycles done in graduate school, to prints of figures and portraits, to large landscapes of the dunes and beaches of Lake Michigan.

Vanderhill is perhaps best known for painting enlarged compositions of small, natural forms—mostly fruit and flowers—using high contrast and intense colors in a way that emphasizes shadows and the negative shapes between leaves and petals.

A member of Northwestern’s faculty since 1974, Vanderhill was an instructor at Muskegon Community College in Michigan for three years before earning a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. He has participated in solo and group exhibitions throughout the Midwest, and his art is part of permanent collections in Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, South Dakota and Wisconsin.

The Te Paske Gallery is located in the Thea G. Korver Visual Arts Center, on Highway 10 at 214 8th Street SW in Orange City. Gallery hours are 8 a.m. to midnight Monday through Saturday and 1 p.m. to midnight Sunday.