Two paintings, “Owl-bert Einstein” and “Stephen Hawking” are now a permanent part of the CUB Art Collection.

Daniel Tate, a WSU Master of Fine Arts graduate and pun enthusiast made the paintings (of an owl and a hawk, respectively) for his thesis.

CUB Senior Associate Director Karee Shaw sits on the art committee responsible for the CUB’s permanent art collection, such as the hanging “Yellow Knot” sculpture near the CUB entrance to the library. She said Tate’s paintings stood out to the committee.

“I think they’re creative and fun,” Shaw said.

Tate worked with former president of the Raptor Club, Nicole Dunham, to create his paintings that now hang in CUB conference room 206.

“I had the time and it seemed like a cool thing to be a part of,” Dunham said. “Not everyone has the chance to go up and see an owl and paint it like that.”

Tate said he worked from pictures he took of the birds in the Raptor Center in person and used water colors in an untraditional way. His imperfect and almost sloppy-looking brush strokes counteract the typical contrived water color medium, he said.

Tate said through his master’s and thesis work it became clearer to him why he paints. He said the whole process, mixing paints, starting out simple and then getting infinitely more complicated in a painting, appeals to him.

“I find that my voice is clearest in painting too,” Tate said.                                           

Originally from Colorado, Tate lived in several different states before deciding to come to WSU to get his master’s in fine arts. He said it’s funny looking back, but one of the reasons he applied to WSU was because he wanted to live in the Pacific Northwest. He said he expected the landscape of Seattle but should have realized Pullman would not be identical, as there are parts of Colorado without mountains too.

A lot of factors contributed to his coming to WSU, including the faculty’s impressive body of work, and Tate said he knew he would be challenged here.

“The fact that they gave you an opportunity to teach while you went to school is pretty special in my mind,” Tate said. “If you get the art side and the teaching side all at once, you’re pretty lucky.”

Tate earned his bachelor’s degree in studio arts from the University of Colorado, Boulder, but didn’t see himself pursuing a career in the arts. Instead, he said he and his brother set off to work in the movie industry, where they wrote screenplays and pitched ideas.

“I was a personal assistant to a producer, I really hate name dropping so …” Tate said.

He said as cool as it was to be working for someone world-famous (OK, it was Adam Sandler), ultimately he found doing someone else’s errands grating and unfulfilling. But, since graduating, he realized that he would never stopped painting.

“It was something that I just did compulsively and will always do compulsively,” Tate said.

He said he comes from a long line of teachers and thought that would be something he would enjoy doing, so he started working toward his teaching license for K-12 grades.

“First I went to Texas, and was working and trying to figure out how to even be an artist, and that led me back to education,” Tate said.

However, he said he also knew from his family that teaching is a time consuming and stressful profession, not conducive to making art for a living. He said most art teachers in K-12 education aren’t working artists, and that’s why he applied to the WSU MFA program.

He was accepted just as he was finishing up his student teaching.

“That brought me here,” Tate said. “And even though I made the biggest strides on my own after I graduated undergrad, it was obvious to me that I still had a lot to learn.”

He said being surrounding by other artists made for a great working environment. His teachers made him question what he was saying with his art, why he was saying it, and if he could say it more effectively.

“You can either treat it like a hobby or you can try to really invest yourself in it and see how far it can take you,” Tate said