Emma Reagan Alley is a 21-year-old senior in the class of 2018 from Nashville, Tennessee. Reagan is working toward graduating this spring with a major in Art and a Spanish minor. Additionally, she runs for the varsity Cross Country team on campus.
Her favorite art classes that she has taken so far at Rhodes have been her Sculpture 200 and her Painting 300 classes. She prefers to create portraits and studies of the human figure as you can see above. Her intimate portraits are often filled with much care and detail.
In her exploration of the human figure she finds interest in the way color and brush stroke can, “capture a subject’s personality or emotions at one specific moment”. There is no larger message that she tries to convey through her artwork. Rather, she views her pieces as personal studies, and quite often has trouble viewing pieces as finished because she is constantly improving her technique and growing as an artist.
Clearly, Reagan is talented in her portrayal of the human figure. However, her rendering of the Bean below displays the skill with which she can draw any object she observes.
She credits Professor Erin Harmon with pushing her development as an artist the most of any professor at Rhodes College. If you would like to see more of Reagan’s magnificent work you can follow her art page @era_artwork on Instagram.