Pitt-Bradford Adds Third Mural to Academic Buildings

The University of Pittsburgh at Bradford has added a third mural to its campus.

“Man and Scholarship” was painted during the spring term by Oleg Gotchev and his Mural Design class. Gotchev, who heads the mural department at the National Academy of Art in Sofia, Bulgaria, taught at Pitt-Bradford in the spring as a Fulbright Scholar.

“I leave behind something done by my hand,” he said of the new mural in Swarts Hall, which houses behavioral and social sciences, nursing, composition, writing, languages, English, and business management and education.

The mural depicts a woman sitting with her legs crossed, similar to a lotus position. Her body forms a triangle, while another body behind her forms a square. A circle encompasses them both.

In each portion of the geometric figures are tiled depictions of the different disciplines.

“This is the symbolic figure of the thinker and creator,” he said, adding that he chose to paint a woman to put emphasis on the emotional part of thinking and creating.

“The idea of this approach is to express how thinking and creating involve not only the mind, but also feelings. Woman is the symbol of this incredible capacity.”

In the center of the woman’s figure, Gotchev painted “I think, therefore I create, therefore I am” in Latin, English and Bulgarian.

The face of the woman is that of the Egyptian pharaoh’s wife Nefertiti, whom Gotchev said he chose to pay homage to the Egyptians’ prowess in mural painting, which was a primary visual communication parallel with pictograms and before the great general separation between mural art and the creation of alphabets.

Gotchev first worked with the 16 students in the class on learning how to paint. Then they prepared a large piece of canvas that was cut into its component parts. Each student had a component to paint that they could work on in the Blaisdell Hall studio or on their own at home.

Students also found the images that were used to depict the 19 disciplines taught in Swarts Hall.

The first of Pitt-Bradford’s academic murals was painted in Fisher Hall, Pitt-Bradford’s building for science and engineering, and depicted scenes of natural beauty in the area as well as mathematical patterns and elements of science. The class that taught that course in Mural Design was Kong Ho, associate professor in art.

In 2008, Ho led another group of students to create a mural depicting the arts in Blaisdell Hall.

Ho spent the Spring 2010 term as a Fulbright fellow at the National Academy of Arts in Sofia, where he met Gotchev.

Pictured, professor Oleg Gotchev stands next to “Man and Scholarship,” a mural he painted in Swarts Hall at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford with help from his Mural Design students.
Photo courtesy of Pitt-Bradford