____Arts & Entertainment_
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Harvey paints world within the self
By Kevin Cowan
Senior Reporter
For some artists, the canvas is a tan
clad mirror, portraying not how they
see the world around them, but the
world within themselves. Dave Har
vey is one such artist. His work comes
from beneath the persona mask.
“Fm trying to get at myself,” he
said, speaking informally behind a
screaming, fuzzy-haired self-portrait.
“I try to be self-aware of things I
experience.”
Unveiled Artist
Harvey works in his graduate stu
dent studio in Woods Art Building
trying to “deal with the frustrations
and emotions we all have.”
No one can deny at least a little
consummation by rip-tide emotion.
Problems arise, he said, when people
don’t have some sort of release for
feel ings of natural i nsan ity or persecu
tion.
Harvey, a first-year graduate stu
dent, has lived in Lincoln for only a
short time. Before his move to the
Midwest, he lived in Kingston, Tenn.,
where he received an associate degree
in arts from Roane State Community
College and then went, on scholar
ship, to the University of Tennessee,
where he received a bachelor of fine
arts degree.
While at Tennessee, Harvey also
got his first taste of doing commis
sioned art work, for a large landscape
architecture firm. The job: three, 15
foot elongated paintings preplanned
by the firm. Harvey said he was
apprehensive.
“The challenge was doing imagery
1 didn’t want to do,” he said. “I’d
promised myself I would never make
art to match someone’s carpet.”
The firm’s only response to the
finished product was “it’s not what we
wanted.’
“It was what they asked for,” Har
vey said, “but they don’t really care.
They never even looked closely at the
slide image they said they wanted.”
Then the firm asked him to redo the
project for free.
“They always think they can get an
art student to do things for free,” he
said.
Harvey said from now on he will
I
Dave Hansen/Daily Nebraskan
Dave Harvey in front of one of his paintings in his studio in Woods Art Building.
make sure everything is straight up
front.
So, with commission experience
under his belt, he was accepted by the
University of Nebraska, where he
could return to painting the things he
wanted, he said.
Now he sits in strange surround
ings, in a studio unscarred as yet from
oil-paint rigors; angst riddled with no
visions of oil on canvas. So he painted
a self-portrait of his inner turmoil.
The picture was an abstract repre
sentation of a bearded, screaming
horror with a long knife ramming it
self into the figure’s eye.
“It disturbed a few people,” he
said. “I rarely bring such angry emo
tions to the outer surface, but I bring
them out on canvas.”
Harvey’s art is the floodgate for
latent emotion. A constructive means
for release.
“I hope it makes the viewer think,”
he said. “I’ve always wanted to grab a
hold of the viewer and shake.”
But, with the question of progres
sive art in mind, one wonders how
long Harvey’s introspection will sur
vive.
“Well, one day I’ll paint one and
it’ll be wrong. Maybe I’ll want to
move on to painting nude ants or
something,” he said.
Thus, the paintings will continue.
With any hope, they will progress with
profound dynam icism. Harvey said he
hopes hc’!l never paint the “perfect
picture.”.
“I hope there will always be a
struggle,” he said. “I hope there will
always be a searching. Because if you
finally do gel lo that perfect portrait,
it’s all over,”
Indeed. Art should never reach that
positivistic stage where all theories
and concepts arc commonplace . . .
kind of a dead language, like Latin.
“If someone made the perfect
painting,” he said, “art would lose all
its meaning.”
If Harvey’s art, with vivid color,
intense thick lines mixed with ice
skate scribblings — powerful emo
tion, to be sure — is any indication,
dynamic creation will reside within
the painter’s mind for cons to come.
--1
Devoted professor
returns to midwest
By Lisa Stankus
Staff Reporter
The dance-postered walls of the
small office of Laura Milan, new
associate professor of theater arts
and dance at the University of
Ncbraska-Lincoln, reflect her 22
years of a devotion to the art.
“1 was a classic case,” she said.
“1 watched ‘The Nutcracker’ on
television when I was 7 years old,
and I said to my mom, ‘I want to
learn how to do that.’ So, the next
day she signed me up.”
From then on, Milan studied
ballet intensely until her mid
teens, when it became obvious to
her that, in spite of her persistence,
her body build would prevent her
from becoming a ballerina.
This realization prompted her to
become interested in other areas of
dance and eventually in teaching,
she said.
‘‘Dance is a hard subject to
teach. There’s no book of rules.
You can’t hand a student a book
and say, ‘This is how it’s done.’
The knowledge is passed down
from individual to individual. You
become a master of the dance and
then you pass down what you know
to your students,” Milan said.
After receiving her bachelor of
arts in dance therapy from Indiana
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University, Milan said, she real
ized that to teach what and how she
wanted, she would need to get a
master’s degree. She went to the
mecca of all dancers, New York.
“New York seems to be the
place where all dancers have to go
to find out what’s up and coming
and keep up with the great mas
ters,” Milan said. “For me, going to
New York was a great way to
combine all my interests. I could
study with the grsat teachers, go
and watch the great companies
and, at the same time, earn my
master’s. So I enrolled at New
York University.”
Though she had planned to slay
in New York only the two years
necessary to complete her studies,
Milan stayed five and was a fea
tured performer with the profes
sional dance company FEATS.
Milan was drawn to UNL be
cause she was interested in teach
ing a variety of dance techniques at
all levels.
“My primary interest is in the
study of kinesiology of the dance,
which is the science of human
motion. It’s learning how to make
motion more efficient and prevent
injury. I wanted to lake that theory
See MILAN on 10
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Dotti Krlst/Dally Nebraskan
Laura Milan, associate professor of modern dance, leads her jazz class in
warmup exercises.
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