It will be hard for anyone to walk through the East Wing Gallery in Pattee Library and miss Jean Thomas Forsberg's exhibit. Oversized paintings, sporting bright colors and abstract images, line the hallway for the "Songs of the Brush" display which runs until March 9.

"Songs of the Brush" contains 12 large canvases in the gallery and smaller watercolors in a glass case. In this exhibit, Forsberg said she tried to merge her interest in sculpture and painting; for instance, two silhouettes facing each other "Double Portrait" are "sculpted" through her extensive use of color.

Forsberg had written in the explanation of her work, "Colors are real, the pigment and viscosity of the paint is as fleshiness, sap and blood." To get this effect, Forsberg said she uses paint mixed with turpentine. For a more visceral, "sappy cell" appearance, she said uses much more oil, thick and often squeezed straight from the tube.

The thickness of the paint is apparent especially in her work, "Late Fall" and less striking in "Lillies."

Painting the canvases takes a long time. Forsberg said she will often work on two or three paintings at a time in trying to achieve the right effect. Colors reflect the subject of her paintings.

"Seasonally, my sense of color changes. Every winter, I use a lot of reds because it's cold out," she said.

In her work "Inside Red," Forsberg explores the intensity of the color red. Forsberg said the red represents human passion.

"Where the Blue Heron Goes" stands out from the other works because of the dark purples and blacks which seem predominant.

"I think the colors you are attracted to depends on your moods," Sara Hedean (freshman-music) said.

Forsberg, who said she is environmentally concerned, emphasized that she prefers to experience nature rather than recreate it.

"It's not what I look in nature, it's what I feel inside of me," she said.

For example, in the predominantly green "Frog Pond", Forsberg said she tried to experience the environment through the frog. Therefore, the resulting painting is not a portrait of a frog; rather, the frogs can vaguely be seen in outline.

Some passersby seemed perplexed by the images Forsberg created and she said she has received inquiries regarding her works and their meanings.

For example, as he studied each painting carefully, one student determined to pick out distinct images. After changing his mind a few times, he gave up.

"(The paintings) are kind of abstract," Chris Orlick (sophomore-electrical engineering) said. "They don't look like you can see anything."

Another student had also puzzled over the paintings. "When I first looked at them, I thought they were weird, now they look like impressionism," Karen Fortier (sophomore-psychology) said.