VCU School of Pharmacy auction raises funds for student scholarships

By Cynthia McMullen

A benefit art auction has raised nearly $11,000 for VCU School of Pharmacy student scholarships. A selection of watercolors by School of Pharmacy Dean Victor Yanchick was auctioned Feb. 3 at the Tompkins-McCaw Library for the Health Sciences. Lisa Schaffner, public relations and marketing director for UNOS, served as auctioneer.

Teresa Knott, Tompkins-McCaw Library director, introduced the dean. “During a visit to his office last spring,” she said, “I asked Dr. Victor Yanchick if he would be willing to show his watercolors in the Tompkins-McCaw Library’s newly created gallery. Dean Yanchick graciously agreed, although I don’t believe he knew what he was letting himself in for.”

The dean’s debut art exhibit, which opened last August and ran through January, garnered critical praise from Richmond arts writer Ann Harmon. In the November 2011 issue of Fifty Plus, Harmon wrote, “A viewer familiar with the work of Andrew Wyeth will sense relationships between Yanchick’s paintings and those of the Pennsylvania icon. The two artists use some similar textural applications in defining both light and aging on the surfaces of buildings or containers.  … [Yanchick] has attended to both the narrative quality and the purely aesthetic in all of his paintings.”

Yanchick, who has been School of Pharmacy dean since 1996, took his first watercolor lessons 11 years ago. He has been painting ever since, he said with a grin, “as a way to escape the daily rigors of deanship.”

In the last several years, sales of his paintings have raised a total of nearly $30,000 for School of Pharmacy scholarships. He also has donated watercolors for fundraising efforts by the Virginia Pharmacists Association, Family Lifeline/CHIP of Richmond, ASK Childhood Cancer Foundation, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation and Comfort  Zone Camp.

As long as I can pick up a paintbrush,” Yanchick said, “I will do this for the school and the community.”