Argyle Winery in Dundee, Ore. was covered in a light blanket of snow when PNCA students Emily Thomas BFA’24, Ellyse Egan BFA’25, and Grace Feucht, BFA’24 visited the vineyards. Seeking inspiration for their wine label designs as part of the 2023 Art of the Sparkling internship, each artist approached the frosty landscape in a unique way.
The wine labels they created were recently released to the public as part of PNCA’s annual collaboration with Argyle Winery, which sponsors three internships that also count toward course credit.
The students visited the vineyard with Director of the Office of Career Design Lynn Brown, instructor of the internship class, and the program’s art director and advisor, Assistant Professor Kristin Rogers Brown. In partnership with their faculty, a design firm, and a labeling plant, the students’ designs started to take shape. The partnership between PNCA and Argyle Winery creates a unique opportunity for burgeoning artists to experience the integration of business and art.
In addition to building industry connections, this year’s internship participants gained professional skills involving collaboration, speaking to the public about their artwork, and creative product development.
The final designs represented the PNCA students’ wide-ranging skill sets — painting, digital design, photography, sketching, and papercuts.
“I used a Kodak Eastman Tourist camera from the 1940s to create a double exposure, black and white photograph. Later, I painted on top of my printed film photograph to reflect the color of the cold temperatures,” shares Egan, who often works with film photography and painting. Eventually, Egan’s photograph morphed into an abstract painting titled “Beyond Branches” with blue tones contrasting sharp black lines on a white background.
Thomas, who sketched her design by hand before filling in the colors digitally, looked closely at the ecology for her work titled, “Think Big, Start Small, Scale Rapidly,” named after one of Argyle’s core values. “I could see little plants starting to stick up out of the ground and thought about what would inevitably bloom in the coming weeks.” Her design is a zoomed-in meditation on the symbiotic relationship between the plants that grow in the vineyards to attract pollinators and the grape plants that are used to make the wine.
Using cuts of colored paper to create a mountain landscape, Feuct’s label reflects the dimensionality of the layers in its texture. “One of my favorite parts of the process was seeing the label be embossed and feeling the different layers of the design, just as if I was running my finger over the real piece,” she says.
The collaboration between PNCA talent and Argyle Winery is a tasteful pairing, again realized in a set of three wine bottles.
