Three senior graphic design majors held a gallery exhibition last week to showcase their creative accomplishments.  

Debbie Trout, Sara Humphries and Chris Greninger’s work, while unique to each artist, came together cohesively with themes of modernity, pop culture, typography and fantasy.   

Their art was displayed in the Spiva Art Gallery during the week of April 22-26.  On Friday, April 26, from 5-7 p.m., the artists hosted a closing reception where friends, family and community members came out to see the art and speak with the artists.

“Between the three of us, most of our family and friends came in, and I don’t know how many exactly, but people kept coming in and we had a pretty good amount of people show up,” said Greninger. “A lot of people really enjoyed the show, and overall thought it was one of the better ones they’ve seen in awhile so that was kind of cool to hear.”

Greninger, who describes his art as inspired by Art Nouveau and Bauhaus styles, is planning to attend graduate school at some point in the future.  For now, he said he’s set his sights on doing more shows locally.

“This is my very first show and it’d be fun to try to do another one, like even just for Third Thursday,” he said.  “I know Focal Point does that little gallery, and I might ask if they’d want to showcase these there.”

 He was also interested in using his work to design T-shirts. His nouveau-style work was inspired by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and the rest was inspired by a wide range of interests including typography, architecture and video games.

Debbie Trout’s art was inspired by typography as well and she said that it was a part of design that she’s greatly interested in.

“I went with three different ways in which we experience type and developed a series on each,” she said. “I went with a series of posters, some packaging design and a typeface design.

“I chose to do the seven deadly sins for my poster series because I wanted to focus more on conceptual meaning which is an area in which I haven’t pushed myself as much.”

Trout produced a packaging design (for cat food) because packaging design is something she would like to pursue as a career, she said. Trout also invented her own typeface for one series. “When developing my typeface I wanted it to have more of a structural and modern look,” she said.

“I feel that with typography it’s not only the words that are to be read as a form of communication, but the feeling that is given off by the design of the type is another form of communication itself.”

After graduation, Trout plans to attend graduate school at Iowa State’s College of design to receive an MFA in graphic design. 

Sara Humphreys displayed two series of art.  One was of three Focal Point advertisement posters for Third Thursday Art Walks, and the other was a series of childhood story posters. 

She said that two of the Focal Point posters were influenced by Albrecht Durer, a 16^th century artist, who was the first to use printmaking as an art form.

“The third poster was for August…and I wanted to make a poster that summed up summer,” she said. “I chose the locust because of how often you hear them singing at night during the summer…because of how quickly their lifespan works and I find that to relate to how quickly summer comes and goes.”

The latter was a colorful collection of pieces inspired by The Secret Garden, Peter Rabbit, The Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan, and  Alice in Wonderland.  Each poster had an inspirational quote printed beneath the image carrying on the use of typography employed by each of the artists.

“My children’s books were chosen because of how influential these stories were in my own childhood,” she said. “The quotes underneath each of the monotypes reminds us of how free and creative we can be as children, but as we grow older we lose that vast imagination and freedom of creativity.”

Humphreys is looking at few different graduate schools to earn a Masters of Fine Arts including University of Iowa, University of Tennessee, and RISD in Rhode Island.

All three artists included elements of fantasy and reality; clean lines and colorful patterns; influences from the past and present.