Drawing From Nature0

Mountain Lake Biological Station inspires art

Winter 2011

Students carried five-gallon buckets that held their art supplies through the hardwood forest of the Appalachian Mountains. When they found something to draw, they turned the buckets over and used them as seats as they sketched. Art professor Megan Marlatt’s summer class spent two weeks at U.Va.’s Mountain Lake Biological Station, and nature served as their art’s subject and inspiration. “The first day, we collected natural specimens, leaves and mushrooms, and we drew them up close. Also, the station has a collection of insects and fungi that we got to draw in detail,” says Marlatt. Next, students drew the deep…

Life Lessons on the Green0

David Cook’s golf novel adapted to the big screen

Winter 2011

David Cook’s golf novel adapted to the big screen

For a Song0

Two former U.Va. a cappella singers hit the big time

Winter 2011

Two former U.Va. a cappella singers hit the big time

Bestsellers at the U.Va. Bookstore: July through September 20110

Winter 2011

New & Notable0

Winter 2011

Take a Ride on the Wild Side0

U.Va. sculptors build interactive art

Winter 2011

Art doesn’t just hang on a wall. Art professor Bill Bennett—with help from members of the local sculpture community, including Edward Miller and Joseph Schepps—transformed an old hay wagon into Byron’s Telescope, an interactive sculpture that audience members can climb into. A chain hoist lifts a coffin-like box and the view through a six-inch “telescope” changes dizzyingly. “Inside the chamber your perspective changes, you feel yourself being lifted, gravity shifts on your body and you come out feeling changed,” says Schepps. The name of the sculpture was inspired by the poet Lord Byron’s 1811 visit to astronomer William Herschel’s early…

Required Reading0

Winter 2011

Creative writing professor Ann Beattie recently published Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life, an exploration of the elusive first lady, Pat Nixon.You’ve been repeatedly credited—despite your protests—with being a “chronicler of the zeitgeist” of those coming of age after the cultural tumult of the 1960s. What were your early influences?I was in graduate school when I started writing seriously, and later publishing, and I was reading Wordsworth. About as recent as I got was Virginia Woolf. What did influence me a lot was watching the televised Watergate hearings every day. It was a constant refrain; it sure wasn’t funny,…

Bestsellers at the U.Va. Bookstore: April through June 20110

Fall 2011