This year, seven students from Northwood High School earned first place in the Eastern Regional Art Showcase.
Hunter Koch, Sam Yigdal, Shelby Kremer, Lydia Farro, Jennifer Greenlee, Jilian Woodcock and Kirsten Sellers all competed in different categories as a group. Koch competed in photography, Yigdal in digital art, Kremer in painting, Farro in mixed media, Greenlee in printmaking, Woodcock in collage and Sellers in drawing.
The prompt the students chose was titled “Unexpected Art.”
Woodcock described her process.
“I cut out pieces of a magazine, different shades and colors, and put them together to create one piece.”
Creating the artwork, however, isn’t set in stone once an idea is created.
“I drew up my idea, and of course it changes throughout the process,” Kremer said.
Leslie Burwell, who teaches the visual art classes at Northwood and sponsors the Art Club and National Art Honor society, told of the class the thought process behind the prompt.
“As a class we brainstormed and came up with what we thought was unexpected or showed unexpected art and then they came up with their own ideas…. Some went with an unexpected medium and others with an unexpected result,” Burwell said.
Students were allowed to go to Burwell to be taught a certain technique or a demonstration process.
“If they were doing printmaking and had never done printmaking before I could demonstrate… or if they were wanting a technique I could show them how to do a technique but they had to do their own work,” Burwell said.
State finals will be held at Atkins High School in Winston Salem on Apr. 5.
-Byron Aguilar
