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April
8, 2002
La
Salle University Sophomore Ty Burrowbridge Wins First Place in School's
Digital Art Competition
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If
you're going to teach art history, reasoned Brother Daniel Burke,
you should have an art collection. More than a quarter of a
century after first thinking that, Burke is now director of
La Salle Art Museum, which hundreds of students from a variety
of classes visit each year. |
"I
was an artist before I was a digital artist," said La Salle University
sophomore Ty Burrowbridge after winning first place in the school's
Digital Art Competition. "My mom is an artist, so I got involved
with art when I was very young," said Burrowbridge, who took home
second place honors in last year's competition. "As I got older,
I became involved with computers and digital art."
His winning entry, "Map of Ambition," started out as a class assignment
when his professor, Sandra Camomile, asked her students to create
a map of how they get to class each morning. "A lot of students
were turning in assignments that literally mapped out their walk
to class, but how I get to class is my ambition to create art,"
said 20-year-old Burrowbridge. "Ty just really took off with this
assignment," said Camomile, an assistant professor in the Mathematics
and Computer Science Departments at La Salle. "He did a great job."
The student art work was judged by two outside sources, and although
the competition was strong, Burrowbridge came out on top. His piece
depicts a filmstrip with three separate frames that contain human
images. "I made the images without faces because that makes them
easily relatable. Anyone can put themselves in those shoes," said
Browbridge, who is from East Stroudsburg, PA. He says frames with
the filmstrip illustrate the inner struggle with oneself to reach
his goals. The first frame shows the image knocking himself down,
the second shows him picking himself up, and the third shows him
pushing himself forward, thereby illustrating self-motivated ambition.
The filmstrip is encased by two stories of the "Bible," Genesis
and Revelation, symbolically representing the beginning and the
end. "The piece can be interpreted in so many different ways," said
Burrowbridge. "Anyone can bring their own story to my piece." Digital
Art Burrowbridge is currently interning at 160over90, an Internet
design firm located in Philadelphia. It is one of the top 40 companies
under 40 years old -- no one over 40 works there.
"It is a really cool place to work. It's a very casual and laid-back
atmosphere, and I get to be creative, but not too creative. I always
make three versions of whatever I am working on: a safe version that
I know the client will like, another version that pushes the envelope,
and a third that breaks all the rules. One of these days someone will
go for the third version," said Burrowbridge. Burrowbridge loves all
kinds of art from charcoal drawing to photography to short films to
digital art. "I always carry a notebook around with me because the
best ideas come to you when you aren't thinking about it," he said.
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