Senior Corinne Stevens spends her time in the Drawing and Digital Art courses exploring the inner workings of the design world and using art as an outlet for her expression. Her selected piece was created out of a prompt from an assignment in her drawing course.
“We wrote haikus and then drew something based off of those haikus. My haiku was about being creative and how that’s how I express myself, so that is where the image came from,” Stevens said.
After two full weeks of work in class, Stevens was able to produce the colored pencil piece, which has since won regional awards in the Governor’s Art Show Competition.
“It shows being awakened to creativity and how I can express myself through images instead of with words. The rainbow and the eyes also symbolize creative thinking,” Stevens said.
Painting – Caroline Beegle
As an AP 2D Art and Design Painting student and National Art Honors Society member, Senior Caroline Beegle started her art career before she even began at the highschool.
“I started painting during COVID. It’s something to do, because locked in my room, there’s not much else going on,” Beegle said.
After the long years of the pandemic and having time to hone her talent, getting back to school and taking a painting class was the obvious choice.
“Freshman year, I signed up for Painting 1, and I thought it was super fun. I loved how, the first day we just started painting. I had no idea what I was doing, but I kind of figured it out along the way, and since then, it’s been super fun,” Beegle said. “I just kind of fell in love with it, and it’s been a super fun way to relax during school. There’s a bunch of new people that probably wouldn’t have met otherwise.”
The piece Beegle chose to showcase, titled “Small Souls,” was created using acrylic and oil paints on a canvas. Beegle described how her central thesis for her AP art portfolio revolves around the impact nature has on her life, and how the narrative for this piece was inspired by that concept.
“The story behind my piece is when I was in preschool, we had this book, and in the book, there were these worms that got left in the sun and they died. And being a 5-year-old, I thought that was super sad. And I would go outside and I’d pick up all the worms, and I would try to put them under leaves and cover them from the sun. And I was late to school a bunch because I would make my mom stop and [cover the worms],” Beegle said.
Photography – Quinn Martini
AP Photography student Quinn Martini is a senior at UAHS and has loved art from a young age. Martini described how her art career started with an interest in drawing as a kid but evidently changed to the art of photography when she reached high school.
“I’m very much a perfectionist, so I found that I could get the realism that I wanted better in photography,” Martini said.
Martini’s photo on display, entitled “When Darkness Falls,” shows two hands holding melting candles, one lit and one extinguished. Martini explained how this fits with the theme of her AP art portfolio for this year: How Do Societal Expectations Influence Well-Being.
“This represents how some people can thrive under societal pressure and others cannot, and the extinguished candle is the ones who can’t, and the lit one is those who can,” Martini said.
Martini described her style as in the realm of dystopian, discussing issues of the world.
“I try to focus on mostly negative aspects of society because I feel like with the world right now, there’s a lot of pressure to be a certain way, and especially in school and stuff too, like there’s a lot of peer pressure and other things,” Martini said.
In her work, she chooses to use real-world events that are relatable to her audience.
“I find mental health to be really prevalent in a lot of people I know, and I try to portray that in some of my artwork. I try to kind of find that release of emotion in my art. And I think a lot of my photography kind of can represent that,” Martini said. “I really try to provoke thought. I want people to kind of dig a little deeper into my photography.”
Jewelry and Metals – Bella Anderson-Bates
Junior Bella Anderson-Bates specializes in jewelry and metals, a trade she got interested in from her grandmother, another jewelry maker who learned her skills from taking classes at The Ohio State University. Over the course of her art education, Anderson-Bates developed a style of art based heavily off of themes of nature and the earth. This piece “Nipping Fox,” was created with the fox jaw bones she found at a local antique store and a piece of smoky quartz connected together with thin silver chains.
“I just love the look of things that can be found in nature. I use a lot of eyes in all of my art. In jewelry I’ve done two things I’m working on, one with eyes right now, and painting. I’m always painting eyes, it’s my favorite thing. I just like how the human body is so interesting to me. And same with animals and nature,” Anderson-Bates said.
Anderson-Bates’ piece shows off the beauty and the tragedy of nature. The use of animal bones in her jewelry to many can be seen as stylistically interesting, but didn’t come without thought from Anderson-Bates herself.
“I think it’s really important to be respectful of an animal and their remains, if you’re going to be using that for art. And I think it’s really cool that humans can use bones in art, but I really wanted to be really careful and use other pieces like crystals to tie together more with nature because I don’t want to feel like I just used some random bones and I was using it for my gain,” Anderson-Bates said.