Artist Wyatt LeGrand featured in City Hall

Each month, City Hall finds a new artist to exhibit in the Atrium.
 
This month, work by IU alumnus Wyatt LeGrand from Bloomfield, Ind., hangs on the purple walls.

“We tend to focus on regional artists,” said Miah Michaelsen, assistant economic development director for the arts. “We selected him because he’s a regional artist and he submitted a portfolio of his work. Not to mention, he’s a really great artist. This is a mix of some new pieces he’s done and some older pieces.”

LeGrand graduated from IU in 2009 with a degree in visual arts education.

He first began painting with oils as a college student and won several awards at “en plein air” painting competitions. He opened his studio, LeGrand Art Studio and Gallery, in summer 2009 in his hometown.

“There’s nothing too complicated about what I do,” LeGrand said in the artist statement on his website. “I just pay attention to what I see.”

At the beginning of the staircase, a large canvas dominates the lower half of the wall. The vibrant colors focus on five people. Others are blurred away in the background, carrying on with their lives.

The people LeGrand focuses on are standing in the street, looking undecided. One is an older man in a ball cap and glasses. Standing a little further behind the man is a small family. A possible grandmother with her daughter and her children are standing still and trying to decide where to go. The title of the painting is “Where do we go from here.”

“It’s very personal in a lot of respects,” LeGrand said. “I know most of the people in the paintings, and the way the scenes are set up, a lot of times there’s kind of a narrative I’m trying to play out in the scene. I think a lot of people read into the artwork and relate it to something they know from past experiences. I think, with the paintings, a lot of them were done with that expectation. It’s a traditional type of painting of a representative subject, but the viewer can still read into it.”

Hanging above “Where do we go from here” is a painting titled “George Heaton: Onset.” An old man sits in an armchair next to a cluttered table as he stares off into the distance.

“George Heaton is my grandfather,” LeGrand said. “I’ve painted him several times, I used him as a model a lot. He and my grandmother were remarkable people.”

There is another painting featuring George Heaton further up the wall. A painting of Avenelle Heaton hangs next to it. In these, George Heaton is eating his dinner and Avenelle Heaton is leaning against a wall.

LeGrand said the two paintings of his grandparents hanging side-by-side in City Hall sprang from an incident in which his grandfather, who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, had to be taken to the hospital. His grandmother, who was supposed to have surgery within the week, had to take control of the situation.

“It was a really weird flip-flop of what they were supposed to do,” LeGrand said. “Grandpa was always the dominant one, and all of a sudden my sweet, soft-spoken grandma had to step in and take care of things. It probably took about a year and a half or so to reflect that whole experience.”

Two paintings are featured without any human presence. One is of two white chairs
sitting in front of a brick house. Another depicts an old red tractor.

The last painting, hanging at the top of the stairs, shows a woman in a blue dress leaning against a pole. The name of the painting is “Twenty.”

“We try to get a variety of different work in here from month to month,” Michaelsen said. “LeGrand has a history of working in the community, and we like that.”

LeGrand’s work will be featured in City Hall until November.

“My inspiration and drive comes from nothing other than the experience of putting brush to canvas, letting the things I see before me flow from eye to heart to hand to brush,” LeGrand said in the artist statement on his website. “These actions, as they occur, bring with them a certain anxiety, excitement and satisfaction that I cannot find elsewhere.”