Growing up in a small house where the TV was always on, Ball State University student Troy Reutebuch developed a way to escape by exploring art.
"Art was just kind of a way to get out of the house without actually getting out of the house," he said.
To this day he still has to have the TV on when he's drawing because he needs white noise, he said.
In April, senior drawing majors Reutebuch and Ben Beaty and senior photography major Megan King will be featured artists for the Artists Within, a local art gallery.
Owner Bob Hartley said the exhibit will open April 5 from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. and will continue throughout the month.
This is a good chance for the student artists to show their talents to a wider audience, Hartley said.
Beaty said he is presenting a series of works focused on a temporary state of things or anything he has experienced in the moment. Each piece is part of a broken narrative that stands alone but has similar themes running throughout all of the pieces, he said.
One piece, named after the book "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," combines elements of graphic novels and comic books with fine art.
Beaty's childhood love for comic books continued when he decided to become an art major, he said. Although comic books are his passion, he now wants to combine them with fine art and make the comic heroes more human-like, he said.
"A lot of comic books are colored digitally now," he said. "It loses that personal connection."
Hartley, Beaty's high school art teacher at Muncie's Southside High School, said Beaty's realistic approach to comic book heroes was more humanlike then Reutebuch's approach.
"Troy has a more futuristic comic book approach," he said. "Some of his characters look like aliens, for example."
Reutebuch said his art represents conflicts during the past six years of his life.
One piece was influenced by the 1951 science fiction film "The Day the Earth Stood Still," he said, and it shows squids forcing their way out of a rocket.
It represents Reutebuch's sophomore year in college when he was first introduced into the Ball State art program. It was a shock because he came from Winamac Community High School, which had an underfunded art program.
"[Ball State] was my first contact with the true world of fine art," he said.
King said she remembered loving photography as a child because her mom had an old camera that King occasionally used.
Her work is mostly about exploring accidental images created with a Holga, or a toy camera, she said. The Holga allows her to advance film in whatever increments she wants, she said.
"This gives me the freedom to shoot overlapping images that string together into a panoramic," she said.
It is important to her to be anti-digital. King does not use computers to develop her film, and this surprises people, she said.
"I want to show people what film and traditional processing can do," she said.
Beaty said he is looking forward to the show, but he also has some jitters.
"It's exciting and nervewracking to be a student artist instead of a professional," he said.
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