For ISU alumna Betty Young, creating art means more to her than just placing paint on a canvas — it’s a form of therapy.

Young, who graduated in May, currently has an exhibit in the Memorial Union. It is her first solo exhibition since her graduation.

The exhibit, titled “Presence and Memory,” is a collection of oil paintings centering around the image of her late father, Gale Hawhee.

Young uses a red flannel shirt to symbolize her father, and the series illustrates a red flannel shirt surrounded by nature. One picture illustrates the red shirt hung out in front of a peaceful forest filled with green leaves.

Young says she decided to use the red shirt because she felt the colors helped better illustrate her emotions and memories she was trying to express about her father .

“[Red] is so vibrant,” Young says. “It’s the color of life.”

However, she feels there is an irony about the pictures that focus on her father’s memory in “”Presence and Memory.”

Along with the paintings of her father’s shirt, Young has also included several oil portraits in the exhibition, all done on wood panels. The portraits range from a young man standing at the edge of a forest in winter to old women sitting in their homes.

Young says she chose to work with wood instead of canvas because she feels canvas is too unstable and wood offers a more solid alternative. It is also easy to find.

The models used in the paintings are mostly people she knows, because she says she likes to incorporate people’s personalities into the portraits. She feels it is harder to represent internal traits in paintings of models she hardly knows.

“I have to have a relationship with them,” she says.

There have been instances where she has asked people she didn’t know to model for her. “Presence and Memory,” features a portrait of a man she approached in a park and asked to model for her.

“It’s not just the way they look, it’s the way they gesture,” Young says. “It’s the whole person I’m drawn to.”

Young’s exhibit also features her woodcut printmaking portraits, which she feels gives her more outlets to express herself artistically.

Her woodcutting portraits depict only the faces of the models, but the contrast of the black ink on the white paper bring out detail in the models that she cannot capture in her oil paintings.

“I love cutting the wood,” she says. “I can’t totally control it.”

Letitia Kenemer, arts program advisor for the Memorial Union, is excited to have Young’s exhibition.

“It’s always nice to have people that graduated come back,” Kenemer says, “and I think that she’s a fabulous artist.”

Kenemer says she also feels Young has an original approach to woodcut and painted portraits.

“She takes things in a different direction and has a variety of styles,” she says.