I go to the student gala every year expecting to be charmed and instead I am usually humbled, and this year was no exception. The Ourelle Art Gala, the annual student art exhibition, is a chaotic, badly lit affair, and every canvas on the wall has more life in it than half of your typical art museum.

The reason, I think, is that the students still paint like people to whom time is happening, and like people willing to say what they see. Nitrina Kathier’s “Are the Blossoms Failing?” offers none of the untroubled, unfalling blossoms the great names have been selling us for years; hers droop and brown at the edges, as though the painter half expected them to fall, because she has plainly noticed that this season they are. And near the east door there is a small, luminous study, Wrenna Rhysand’s “Nightwork,” a pair of hands cupped around a candle, in front of which I stood far longer than is dignified for a man of my standing. Rhysand understands light better than most people twice her age, if there were people twice her age, which lately there do not seem to be.

Not all of it works, of course. There is a large and very serious canvas titled “Duty,” whose maker I will mercifully decline to name, which I will not describe except to say that it is dull and vapid. And there is Tobin Marrow’s “Leviathan,” a kraken assembled entirely from kitchen spoons, which made me laugh in a depressing sort of way. One last thing: a piece I had marked to write about, Ollin Frey’s “The Road South,” a long grey landscape with a road running off the bottom of the frame, was gone from its hook by the second evening, and no one at the door could tell me where it had gone or where the artist went.

Ron Rudson is the Chronicle’s Arts Critic. He will be at the Nascium bar afterward, as ever, and welcomes disagreement by owl.