Joel Washington has been doing art his whole life and has specialized in acrylic paintings, mainly portraits. The paintings in this show deviate from his normal in that they are all abstract, something that he has been thinking about for a while and is now wanting to share.
When Joel was child, he watched the Beatles' film The Yellow Submarine, which inspired him to become an artist, and as an adult, he takes artistic cues from the movie to this day.
"I'm always seeing something in it that I missed the last time," Washington says of the film. "It just has so much going on in it that I get excited every time I notice something new, whether it's in the background or how the characters are drawn. It's just loaded with art and imagination."
Washington is an internationally-known artist with his work on display at the U.S. Embassy in Thailand and elsewhere with many paintings hanging in the halls of IU. He presented Quincy Jones with a portrait of Michael Jackson during his visit to IU. As he walks the halls of the student union during his day job, many people have no idea he’s the man responsible for some of the paintings they stop to explore, like the piece featuring Indianapolis jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery.
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