Three NHS Students Place In State Art Contest

By Martha Coville

“I wanted to make it complete in it’s incompleteness,” said twelfth grader Irene Koh of a mixed media portrait she submitted to the Connecticut Scholastic Arts Awards Program.

Irene is one of three Newtown High School students who received an honorable mention or higher distinction in the recent contest. Fellow senior Meaghan Prophy and sophomore Jacqueline Rosa also were also honored with in a gallery reception at the Hartford School of Art.

All three entries were hung is the school’s Silpe Gallery. In total, the exhibit featured 500 of the 2,000 submitted entries.

Irene won a gold key, the highest award given. A digital image of her work will be submitted to the National Level Scholastic Art Awards. Jacqueline was awarded a silver key for an entrance in ceramics, the second highest award, and Meaghan received honorable mention for a her still life painting.

The contest was juried by local professional artists and university art faculty.

Two Seniors,

Two Paintings

Irene explained that her entry was part collage and part acrylic painting, although she actually began with plain old house paint.

 “The process was actually just getting the poster board, painting house paint on it, putting newspaper on that, letting it dry, and then putting the acrylic on that. Then we had to incorporate the colors of the acrylic with the colors of the house paint,” she said of the assignment.

To choose a subject, she said, she and her classmates, “Looked through old photos that we had. So this picture was of me and a friend in Korea. We were at a café, listening to my iPod. I just remember it as being one of my more fond memories of Korea. It was my sister’s friend at NYU; he came to visit. I don’t usually have friends there.”

After she had allowed the newspaper to dry, Irene said, she had to choose which parts to obscure with acrylic and which to leave bare. “I just left the newspaper were it looked natural,” she said, because, “I wanted to make it look complete in it’s incompleteness.”

Together, the house paint, newspaper, and acrylic create a piece more closing resembling a drawing, then a painting. The newspaper, showing through the layers of earth-toned paint creates a sense of light and shadow. It calls attention to a cheekbone, a shoulder, and an elbow of the two students sitting across the table from each other. Left bare and white, the newspaper guides the eye across the canvas.

Although Irene won a substantial scholarship to The Savannah (Ga.) College of Art and Design,  she said she plans to attend the Rhode Island School of Design next year.

Meaghan Prophy, also a senior at NHS, said that although she is looking forward to taking art classes in college, she does not plan on majoring in the subject.

“I really like charcoal pencil,” Meaghan said. “It’s probably the medium I’m the most comfortable with. I’m really undecided about what I want to do, but I want to do more painting and drawing classes in college.”

“I did my entry for the Scholastic Art Awards last fall,” she said. “We just had to paint a section of a still life set up in the middle of the classroom. It was a still life basically with different elements of fall, and when I think of fall, I think of pumpkins,” she said, explaining why she zeroed on the pumpkin. “I just thought it made a really good composition,” Meaghan said.

Of the other elements in her painting, she said, “I chose the green background because I thought it would complement the other colors. Also, the other colors were kinda on the warmer side, so this is a cooler color.” The green background, lighter in the center of the canvas and darker toward the edges, calls attention to the rich texture of the hay bales upon which the pumpkins rest.

From The Wheel

 To The Kiln

NHS sophomore Jacqueline Rosa took her ceramic plate out of a department store bag, then out of a cardboard box, and finally unwrapped the bubble wrap protecting it. The plate, bisected by tree branches, is white and black and textured.

To achieve the texture, she said, “I used a method called sgraffito. What I did was, I threw a plate on the potter’s wheel,” using white clay. “And then I put black slip on it. Slip is just clay in a really liquidy form. You can dye it black or blue or whatever color. Then I took a special sgraffito tool — it’s like a little hook — and you can use it to scrap away the clay. So I just scraped around the branches on the plate, to let the white clay show through the slip.”

“Mrs Pelligra, my teacher, suggested that I add a flower to the composition, and I really liked that idea because it really added a focal point. So I fired the plate in the kiln, and then I put a clear glaze on it. I colored with flower after the first firing, with a pink and purple glaze.”

Jacqueline said she is already taken drawing, sculpture, and ceramics classes at NHS. “I think next year I’ll take Ceramics 3 and maybe Two-Dimensional Art, but I’m definitely going to continue with ceramics.”