Bruce Garrity took artist Scott Noel and DoN on a tour of the Paul Robeson Library on the Rutgers campus. When DoN saw the sign saying Paul Robeson he time-warped back to childhood when the famous actor and singer appeared at the Academy of Music. DoN told the guys he saw him as a child and they were duly impressed, but DoN worried about reporting false memories so DoN wiki’d Robeson and it’s the same guy my aunt took me to see.

The library is really expansive and comfortable and Garrity, a studio art lecturer in Rutgers Fine Arts department, has several nuanced paintings displayed throughout the building. Combining semiotic symbolism with modern painting techniques, the canvases resonate with liveness – birds, water, foliage, pottery, fish… Artist Scott Noel commented on the loveliness of the folds in the fabric lying on rocks and the references to Greek art. Garrity’s use of symbols for paintings displayed in a library is coded with signs and signatures of the room’s purpose: to learn. Yet the pleasant scenes are soothing and cool to gaze into to.

Garrity was one of the organizers of the “To Be or Not To Be: A Painters Dilemma” symposium recently held on the Rutgers campus and is the curator of the Hopkins House Gallery on Cooper River Park. Garrity’s eye for post modernism is focused and adventurous, his students like him a lot and his grasp of the language of art is sure.

Artist, Bruce Garrity in the Paul Robeson Library @ Rutgers.

Bruce Garrity @ Rutgers’ Paul Robeson Library.

Artist Scott Noel with painting by Bruce Garrity. During Noel’s talk at the symposium he spoke about the nexus of psychology and observation; there is a graphic iconography in painting that speaks it’s own language.