Barrhead Composite High School students had a chance to show off their talent to the rest of their schoolmates, as well as family and friends, during the school’s annual Junior High School Art Show.
The two-day art show, Jan. 26 and 27, featured 36 Grade 7 and 9 students featuring a variety of artistic styles and mediums.
Lori Sagbo, junior high school art teacher, said she tried to give her students a wide variety of styles and mediums to choose from when creating their artworks.
“We looked at da Vinci, Michelangelo and Andy Warhol this semester and then I gave them five different choices for projects and they were given four months to create their artwork,” she said.
The Grade 7 were also given an additional assignment in which they had to showcase different fish life through creating a special canvas using paper and bubbles with food colouring.
“This year changed how I taught my students. In the past it was a lot more teacher driven where I would show them how to do something and then they would try to implement it in their own work. This year I did some really quick tutorials on how to use a medium and then gave them as much freedom as I could,” she said, adding the result was students works were much more diverse. “We have everything from sketching and watercolours to digital graphics.”
Although the students were given a lot of leeway, Sagbo did provide some guidelines for the da Vinci-based artwork.
“Leonardo da Vinci was really interested in anatomy and body parts so the only requirement I put to them is that there had to be an anatomically correct body part in it somewhere,” she said.
Students were also encouraged in their Artist of Choice piece to choose a specific song lyric and create artwork around it.
“A lot of people don’t realize that Michelangelo was really into poetry and he used it as inspiration for many of his paintings,” Sagbo said.
Emily Savoie, Grade 9, who had a number of different pieces in the show, said she enjoys using a wide variety of different mediums.
“One of my favourites is watercolour, but I don’t think I’m very good at it yet,” she said, adding the medium she is most comfortable using is graphite pencil.
When asked to describe where she got the idea and inspiration for ‘Fake You Out’, her da Vinci anatomy piece, she wasn’t sure.
“I knew I wanted to do something really messy, about how your brain can get all staticy and blurry when you are depressed or anxious,” she said. “Plus I wanted to make sure all the newspaper items around it were meaningful so I chose song lyrics or news articles about suicide and drug abuse.”
Ashlyn Hladilo, Grade 7, said she has been interested in art ever since she took her first art class in Grade 1.
“I especially like sketching and using pencil crayons,” she said. “All my sketchpads at home are filled with pencil crayon drawings.”
Besides art, Hladilo is interested in medicine and wants to become a doctor, more specifically a surgeon and her favourite TV show is Grey’s Anatomy.
“Both of those things kind of influenced my choice to pick a heart in my da Vinci piece with flowers coming out of the arteries,” she said.
