 "Photo: Tina Russell")
Molly Bender has always been the occasional doodler, and at UCF she was able to feed her artistic bug when she took a painting class to fulfill a credit requirement.
She found her artistic voice when she was finally able to apply paint to canvas. Painting allowed her to be intuitive, and from that point she knew she wanted to pursue painting as a career.
Two years later and with the guidance of Carla Poindexter, her mentoring professor and associate director of art at UCF, senior Molly Bender will graduate this semester with a B.F.A. in studio art, specializing in painting.
After graduation, Bender wants to make a career out of painting. She will be looking at galleries in Florida in hopes that a gallery will pick her up as an artist and showcase her paintings.
Bender’s said her paintings are a mixture of abstract and landscape paintings, but differ greatly from traditional landscape in that her paintings are about removing religion completely from landscape and seeing what will become of it. She said landscape paintings have been historically done for two reasons: religious imagery and a way to persuade people to move out West during the expansion of the West.
“People saw landscape as a way to show the magnificence of God, because, in art, you have your horizon line where there is this way into the background and a way to travel through it,” Bender said. “It’s a religious metaphor towards the magnificence of God, to go towards the light, and lead through everything else to get to God.”
Bender said she has removed God from her landscape paintings by using more vertical lines in her work.
“A vertical line tips over, it’s erect, it’s standing upon itself, and you can feel the feeling the gravity of a vertical line,” she said. “I work a lot with drips now. I am enjoying how that kind of feels and how the canvas is weeping out at you. You really get a sense of the up, down, and rigid emotion.”
Senior painting major, Jessica De Salvo said she respects the struggle in the paint strokes found in Bender’s paintings.
“What I mean by struggling in her strokes is that when an artist has made a stroke and decided she didn’t want it anymore, she goes back over it with another layer of paint,” De Salvo said. “It’s always good to see a struggle in a painting, because you know that the artist is putting a lot of thought in their piece of work.”
Poindexter said the UCF Art Department aims to get art students in a good graduate program, and help students develop a series of related work that shows skillful rendering and application.
“It’s really important to help students find their visual voice, and that is what Molly is attempting to do,” Poindexter said. “Plus, we try to prepare them professionally for the art world; to guide them in an understanding of contemporary issues, and we prepare them to speak and write about their work.”
Poindexter said Bender’s landscape is not peopled, they do not contain human architecture, nor do they take place in a specific time or place. She said Bender’s landscape’s represent ideas of calm, plenty, or sometimes nothingness.
“Bender is dealing with that kind of thing where when one looks at her paintings, it reminds them of a landscape but maybe more poetic.”
Bender’s paintings have been displayed in Collective 09, a student show that took place in Gallery 210, located in the visual arts building.
Bender also won the 2009 Open circle art exhibition with her painting, “Had I Known You Were Coming I Would Have Put Something On.”
While looking for galleries that will showcase Bender’s work, Bender will be getting married after graduation, and eventually entering graduate school.
“I’m very fond of Molly’s work, and I hope in the future that I may be able to own one of her pieces,” De Salvo said.
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