Students from Western Carolina University’s Master of Fine Arts program will be featured in a new lecture series to begin Feb. 6.

The series will span a wide range of artistic interests, opinions and aesthetics as the 14 MFA candidates — painters, sculptors, textile artists, installation and new media artists — discuss their works’ influences and origins.

“I don’t think it’s all that often that people get to really get into the meat of how artwork comes into being,” said Andy Cline, a painter and first-year MFA student.

Each lecture will be a reflection of the individual artist’s concerns with their current body of work, and will conclude with an invitation for audience members to join artists in their studios for an informal reception to view new works and to continue discussion.

“The idea is that our program is a professionally based program, and we encourage our students not only to exhibit their work in a professional setting both in and outside the university, but we want them to talk about their work too,” said Jon Jicha, MFA program director.

The students featured in the lecture series are among the first and second classes to graduate from the MFA program. The program is the only terminal degree program in the fine arts in this part of the state and is the only summer intensive program in the Southeast region. The program is considered to be unique for its emphasis on studio work, as well as the quality and diversity of its full-time and visiting faculty.

“This lecture series — along with exhibitions of their work, which have been presented region-wide since the program was established in the summer of 2004 — gives the larger arts community a chance to witness a dynamic group of emerging artists from around the country who have gathered in Cullowhee to complete their professional degree in studio art and who are about to contribute to the national art scene,” said Robert Godfrey, the program’s studio coordinator.

Each lecture in the series will be held at 4:30 p.m. in Room 223 of Western’s Fine and Performing Arts Center. The lecture series schedule is as follows:

• Feb. 6 — William Clements, a figurative sculptor and printmaker, graduated from Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. Clements studied sculpture at the New York Studio School and was a studio monitor at Robert Blackburn’s PrintMakers’ Workshop. Now at Western, his work focuses on the subjective figure and the discovery of meaning through process.

• Feb. 13 — Greg McPherson is an oil painter working in the traditions of landscape and abstraction. He studied photography at the University of Georgia, where he received a B.A. McPherson says his works “convey a timelessness that pervades the land.” He imagines a history of looking at the landscape that delivers us to a horizontal plane where specificity is lost and what remains is residual.

• Feb. 20 — Susan Lucier received her bachlor’s degree in fine art from Keene State College in New Hampshire in 1997. In 2001, she moved to Asheville and then Burnsville to work with the glassblowers William and Katherine Bernstein. She continues to apprentice for them and is in her first year at of the MFA program. Recently she was a recipient of the Toe River Arts Council’s Scholarship for the Arts. Lucier works in oil paint, glass, and other media.

• Feb. 27 — Andy Cline is a painter who works in fluctuating styles and forms. Cline earned his bachelor’s degree from Warren Wilson College. His work is inspired by his love of travel. He spent a year in India and Sri Lanka where he worked with engaged Buddhist and Ghandian organizations and has also worked with NGO’s and landless people’s movements in Thailand, Mexico and the United States. Systems of social organization, defined largely by wealth and class as well as tradition are often at odds with each other. These conflicts of survival and humanity’s ongoing war against nature create the impetus for his current work.

Also featured on Feb. 27 will be Sarah Noble, an oil painter currently working on small intimate still lifes whose mystery stems from the enigmatic spaces they occupy.

• March 20 — Kathryn Temple is a painter/installation artist and writer. She has been awarded artist residencies and/or grants by the Vermont Studio Center, Dorland Mountain Arts Colony and the Asheville Area Arts Council. Her writing has been published in The Fire This Time: Young Activists and the New Feminism and the Yale University feminist journal Manifesta. She is also the author and illustrator of Art for Kids: Drawing. She has worked with refugee and immigrant survivors of domestic violence and has served on the board of OurVOICE, Asheville’s rape crisis center. Her recent work deals with issues of echo and reflectivity.

• March 27 — Heidi Leitzke is a painter, concerned with both the rich tradition and the future of the visual language in painting and drawing. She received her bachelor’s degree from Anderson University in Anderson, Ind. Leitzke’s paintings come from a number of sources including: found organic objects, perception of nature, masterworks, and her own drawings. Currently Leitzke is working in her studio and teaching an undergraduate life drawing course.

Also featured on March 27 will be K. Sullivan, born in Nashua, N.H. Sullivan will be addressing her investigation through painting of concepts related to the landscape that possess dual identities or ideas.

• April 3 — K.L. Dunn incorporates details, narrative and abstracts into her work, which focuses on motion, whether it’s something to be filmed, programmed or performed with singular or multiple partners.

• April 10 — Sally Jacobs is a painter and primary school teacher who has traveled to Italy to study painting and has explored her work through traditions such as Byzantine iconography. She is interested in both the figure and the landscape and often represents the psychological personality of her subjects.

• April 17 — Kelledy Francis is a lauded Asheville-based artist and seamstress who creates garments that she says challenge contemporary notions of femininity and what art “should” be. Her work incorporates new media and performance art as a means of expression.

Also featured on April 17 will be Jennifer Lipsey, an arts educator and author of children’s books. Lipsey shifts moods and meanings of figure in her vibrant use of oils, gouache, and most recently encaustic medium.

• April 24 — Jasmine Sadki, an oil painter from Rochester, N.Y., completed her bachelor’s degree at Lynchburg College in Virginia. In her work, Sadki tends to focus on everyday life scenes.

For more information about the lecture series contact Jicha at 828.227.3597.