Mangubi Blends Art With Science in Her Drawings & Paintings

Wooster professor known for her signature landscape paintings on 2x4 pieces of lumber

Marina Mangubi’s approach to drawing and painting is part art, part science.

An associate professor at The College of Wooster since 2000, Mangubi was born in Moscow and later immigrated to the United States, where she graduated from San Francisco’s prestigious Lowell High School with Advanced Placement credit in math, physics, and chemistry.

“Unfortunately, art classes at Lowell were no match for painting at the Moscow Palace of Pioneers, where I had studied for years and first learned about non-conformist art,” said Mangubi.

With art school tuition beyond her reach, Mangubi continued painting on her own, lugging an easel around San Francisco and, later, Berkeley, where she enrolled at The University of California and majored in psychology with an emphasis in neuroscience.

As a sophomore, she took an art class, which she really enjoyed, but in order to get the full complement of classes, she had to add art as a second major, which gave her degrees in both disciplines. “I couldn’t give up the idea of taking advanced courses in neuroscience, but I was not ready to let go of my love for art either,” she says. “Unfortunately, you can’t double major in grad school.”

So Mangubi decided to take a break from her schooling. She found a job doing clinical research in psychiatry. “It was a way to make a living and stay connected with the field (of neuroscience),” she says. It also could have led to a lucrative career in psychopharmacology, but when offered the chance to become director of clinical research (at the age of 25), she turned it down and instead decided to pursue a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting at the University of Michigan. There she became involved in several installations and collaborative projects with architects and — not surprisingly — engineers.

After several temporary positions at colleges in Massachusetts and California, Mangubi moved to Corvallis, Ore., for a two-year appointment at Oregon State University, where she taught painting, drawing, and printmaking. It was there that she fell in love with the breathtaking landscapes of the Pacific Northwest, and began sketching them from the back of her pickup truck.

Rather than using conventional drawing media, Mangubi chose drypoint, a printmaking technique in which the image is “scratched” into a metal plate with a sharp needle. The grooves retain the ink applied to the plate, which is then printed on an etching press. On paper, the drypoint mark yields very fine lines. On metal, the drawn image is almost illegible. “From its elusiveness stems the challenge of this technique as well as the impetus to rely on one’s intuition,” she says.

The process itself is not unusual, but what Mangubi does next is. She takes those sketches and brings them to life in oil-on-board (a medium akin to the Northern Baroque tradition) on a support that defies conventions — an eight-foot long 2x4 piece of lumber, giving a miniature landscape a monumental presence.

“I draw while looking at the landscape and make a mental map of sorts,” she says. “Then, when I paint in the studio, I fill in the details and meld my imagination with the observations from the landscape. The precision forces me to understand the role of every minute detail within the continuum (a method she likens to that of calculus). The fact that calculus was invented in the late 17th century, the period also known as the Golden Age of landscape painting, is no coincidence.”

It takes one or two months of labor-intensive work (12-hour days) to complete one “board,” but it has paid off for Mangubi. In addition to numerous one-person exhibitions in the United States, she was profiled on French national television during her research leave as the Camargo Foundation Fellow in Cassis in 2004.

Mangubi, who has adjusted well to life at this small Midwestern liberal arts college, was initially attracted to Wooster by its friendly atmosphere and striking art facilities, but it was an Independent Study (Wooster’s nationally acclaimed senior capstone project, which matches a student with a faculty member in a yearlong project) exhibition that sealed the deal. “I was very impressed with the quality of the students’ work,” she says. “I felt it was on par with much of the graduate-level work I had seen.”

Now in her eighth year, Mangubi continues to be impressed with and committed to her students. “I am very focused on giving them the means to express what they want to say through their art,” she says. “I think it is important to show students what it’s like to be an artist.”