The New Hampshire

Issue date: 3/30/07 Section: Arts & Living

Media Credit: Courtesy Photo Scenes from an exhibition: "The Disasters of War" by Francisco de Goya.

The lower room of The Art Gallery, which is located in the Paul Creative Arts Center, is painted with the cheerful glow of natural lighting from a large window that rises from the floor to meet the ceiling and lengthwise extends about ten feet.

Whitewashed walls, adorned with paintings that are as bright and cheerful as a bowl of Fruity Pebbles, zigzag at obtuse angles to create a creative and enticing atmosphere.

It's uplifting.

In the upper gallery, on the other hand, the traditionally ordered walls appear grey from the soft lighting of spot lamps that hang from a circumnavigating track.

Here and there, the wall is interrupted by a sheet of scarlet red, and mounted on these walls. Hanging at regular intervals, are equally-sized, black and white visions of starvation, torture, murder, death and general inhumanity.

It's depressing.

But in a world that struggles with the sorrows of 9/11, the genocide in Darfur, and the Iraq war, the exhibit strikes a resonate and emotional chord with many.

On Jan. 20 the UNH art gallery opened the famous, Napoleonic era painter, Francisco de Goya's, etchings series, "The Disasters of War."

"It's just so emotional," said gallery attendant, Tiffany Heineman, as she described a print that she found particularly poignant.

The print, titled "No se puede mirar" or "One can not look at this" in English, depicts a group of civilians who are about to be shot. A cloaked woman clutches her young child. A man kneels stiffly, presumably in prayer, bracing himself for the end. Another woman has her head thrown back and her arms extended at her sides and seems to wail in despair. A man in the foreground kneels before his executioners with his hands clasped, pleading for his life. And sticking out of the right side of the frame is a cluster of rifle muzzles with attached bayonets.

"I don't know if I could call it my favorite, but it's the one that shocked me the most," said Heineman.

Sean McGrimley, the gallery attendant that was watching over the "New Hampshire Art Association's 59th Annual Exhibition" downstairs, said of the Goya exhibit, "It's a downer for most people."

However, he also said, "I like it. It's just when you look at it you're like, 'Wow."

Continued...

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