The artist within the professor

In one work of art, a bright red amaryllis blooms against lush folds of fabric and spikes of grass. In another, through a riot of leaves and flowers, the turret of a building mysteriously rises. Shapes and colors swirl. It’s the art of collage, as created by Sharon Beachum, associate professor of art at Virginia Wesleyan.

Like her art, Beachum’s life is a collage layered with travel, photography, gardening, workshops, exhibitions – and introducing students to the creative possibilities of art in their lives. Today, the possibilities go beyond traditional media like paint and canvas to include personal computers, digital photography, scanners and graphic software programs such as Adobe Photoshop. All are 21st century artist’s tools that come into play both in Beachum’s art work and in the classes she teaches in computer art, digital imaging, photography, mixed media and graphic design.

Because of the college’s liberal arts focus and aesthetic course requirements, the opportunity to experiment with visual expression can be life changing for some students.

“Quite a few become art converts,” Beachum said. “They’ll take a class and discover something in themselves they didn’t know was there. It’s exciting to see.”

Senior Jen Thornton had taken only one high school art class when she enrolled in Beachum’s Introduction to Computer Art course.

“I fell in love with the freedom that the computer and digital tools give an artist,” Thornton said.

An art major, Thornton recently had her work on exhibit in Hofheimer Library. One of her pieces, created in Beachum’s Digital Imaging class, was selected for the college’s permanent art collection.

Beachum’s interests in fine art, photography, nature and gardening began early in her Oklahoma City childhood, as the youngest of four children.

“When my parents took the four of us for Sunday drives, we’d all take along sketchbooks,” she said. “Whatever else we were doing, we’d sketch and draw. We went camping and learned about nature and wildlife. Even living in the city, we always had a garden.”

Along the way, Beachum began collecting the memorabilia that today shows up in her art work.

“I have collections of dried flowers, seeds, and every letter or card anyone ever sent me,” she said. “I have boxes and trunks with ephemera from every trip I have ever made. Everything is fair game.”

Beachum is still an avid gardener. When she and her husband, artist and photographer Brian Beachum, moved last year, she dug up and potted more than 100 plants, bushes and flowers for the garden of their new home.

Transplanting herself here four years ago from past professorships in the art departments of Hampton University and Old Dominion University, Beachum found an environment that welcomed both her teaching experience and her personal creativity.

“People here said, ‘Hey, you can do photos, you can design, that’s all great,’” she recalls.

“But above all, they wanted me to be what I am, an artist. Virginia Wesleyan was the right match for me.”

There’s enthusiastic agreement from Dr. Joyce B. Howell, professor of art history and curator of art exhibitions.

“She’s a rare blend of being a committed, outstanding artist in terms of her personal expression and a teacher who is very much in touch with each of her students,” Howell said. “She makes her students stretch. It’s one of the greatest gifts of a teacher, to bring students up to and beyond their personal best.”

Of Beachum’s artistic style of collage, Howell says, “The French term, ‘collage,’ uses the idea of juxtaposition, gathering found objects from non-art contexts, and bringing them together into coherence. Sharon’s images have a way of resolving disparate things. She brings in photographic images that convey pure visual pleasure, and creates a little world that is a kind of paradise.”

Beachum has trekked with camera and sketch book to far-flung places, introducing students to the art of other cultures. She took a Hampton University group studying architecture to Pompeii, Rome, Sorrento and Florence. In the People’s Republic of China on a Fulbright Travel Grant, she got separated from her fellow scholars and spent a day on her own exploring Beijing’s Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square. In Japan for seven weeks with a group from Hampton University, she taught a humanities course in Japanese art history to both American and Japanese students at a small college.

“I’d teach in the morning, then we’d hop on a train and go into Tokyo to see the very things I had just shown slides of in class,” she said.

Beachum’s artistic travels in this country have focused on workshops that hone her skills both for personal expression and for the classroom. She has studied nature and garden photography at the Maine Photographic Workshops. In New Mexico at the Santa Fe Workshops last year, she learned how to preserve digital art works for 150 years into the future using highly technical archival print processes.

For the near future, Beachum hopes to see a sort of collage process evolve at Virginia Wesleyan in which fine art, music and drama become interwoven, heightening the impact of each discipline.

“I’m on a committee to represent art in developing future cultural programming,” she said.

“I’d like to explore ideas, for instance, such as looking at works of art in relationship with musical genres like jazz.”

Lee Jordan-Anders, artist-in-residence, professor of music, and chair of the Humanities division at Virginia Wesleyan, praised Beachum’s standards both as an artist and a teacher.

“It can be easy for art and music teachers to lapse into an ‘Oh, this is just fun and games’ attitude,” Jordan-Anders said. “It can’t be that way. We have to recognize that we’re not only teaching about our media but also about the aesthetic standards we hold dear. I see that in Sharon Beachum’s work and I appreciate it.”