Series of shows at Ybor gallery exhibits HCC art students' work

The lessons teachers pass on to their students often can't be measured in test scores alone, and sometimes they never know what their influence has been. Art teachers maybe have more concrete references. That's one of the lessons we get in "Stretching the Imagination," a new show at Hillsborough Community College Ybor Campus Art Gallery in Tampa.

It's the first in a series that director Carolyn Kossar plans that exhibits an art teacher's work with his or her students. In this case, the teacher is Jeanne Cameron, an adjunct professor at HCC and University of Tampa, where she teaches painting and graphic design.

More and more, Cameron says, she uses the computer to design a painting before she puts brush to canvas.

"The computer program helps me foresee what the painting will look like and I can also change colors without a lot of overpainting," she says. "It changes once I hit the canvas, of course. You have to bend."

The result is a crisp style with a touch of the abstract. In Consideration, for example, she filters out most of the details of the famous stained glass window in Chartres Cathedral, which she surrounds with super-realist magnolias painted in various stages of bloom.

Her students have to hew to a traditional path before they can use computer wizardry in her painting classes, though.

"I have them work from life and what they see at first," she says.

She has chosen about 15 works by students past and present to participate in the show so we get to see how well they have learned their own lessons.

The exhibition at the gallery, located in the Performing Arts Building, Palm Avenue and 15th Street in Ybor City, continues through July 17. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday. Free admission.

Lennie Bennett can be reached at lennie@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8293.