The exhibition Oscar Bluemner: Color Sketches, featuring works from Stetson University’s Vera Bluemner Kouba Collection, now on display at Stetson’s Hand Art Center, will be the subject of a lecture at 7 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 2, by exhibition curator Dr. Roberta Smith Favis.  (Pictured, from the current exhibit: “Oscar Bluemner, Untitled, Feb. 15, 1911, colored pencil on paper, 5 in. x 7 in., Vera Bluemner Kouba Collection, Stetson University.)

“Most of the pieces on display capture commonplace scenes of the New York and New Jersey suburbs and countryside not far from New York City, where the artist lived at this time,” said Favis, professor emerita of art history and curator of Stetson’s Vera Bluemner Kouba Collection.

“The works were drawn with a new type of particularly vibrant and versatile colored pencils that enabled the artist to combine his interest in the expressive qualities of color with his immediate response to subjects observed from nature.”

Bluemner was born and educated in Germany and came to the United States in 1892 to work as an architect. By the first decades of the twentieth century he became interested in modernist experiments in art and turned his attention and, eventually, his practice to painting.

“The exhibit features colorful artworks from the time when the artist was solidifying his decision to abandon his architectural career in favor of painting,” Favis explains.

Her talk will review the history of Stetson’s extensive collection of works by American Modernist Painter Oscar Bluemner (1867-1938) and discuss the importance of the colored pencil sketches made in 1910-1911 in the evolution of the artist.

This exhibit, which will be shown through Dec. 2, continues the mission of the Hand Art Center to display and interpret works from Stetson’s extensive collection of artwork by Bluemner.

The lecture, which is open to the public, free of charge, will be held in Room 25 of the Instructional Media Center, at Stetson’s duPont Ball Library, 134 E. Minnesota Ave. For more information, please contact the Hand Art Center at Stetson at (386) 822-7270.