Brendan Taylor - Vision Award - $500 cash scholarship
Elizabeth Hill - Portfolio Award - $75 Preston’s gift card
Megan Smith - Community Award - $50 Preston’s gift card
Claire Vicars - Inspiration Award - $25 Preston’s gift card
The journey from 14 to 18 years of age is a time of discovery and finding one’s self; identity forms but doesn’t ever finish. For artists, it is when the simple pleasure of drawing becomes a vital and intentional means of expression. A newly found focus on medium and technique points to the next level of growth and maturity.
As the greatly disrupted schoolyear came to a close, Louisville Visual Art is pleased to have finished out Academy classes online and is proud to recognize the accomplishments of four Academy Seniors.
Megan Smith graduated from DuPont Manual High School
Because of that interest in identity, self-portraits are common. Megan Smith’s “To The Center” highlights the Pop Art colors of a hard candy sucker in contact with analogously colored lips by allowing the face to remain in black and white. The image balances illusion and reality, surrealism and naturalism, and is striking, simple, declarative, and fun.
Megan will be studying at IUS this fall, majoring in Psychology.
Megan Smith, “To The Center”
Elizabeth Hill graduated from Corydon Central High School
Elizabeth Hill explores the fundamental relationship of structure in nature and how humankind has followed it in design and architecture. Every child anthropomorphizes their toys, seeing a giraffe in every crane, and an elephant or rhinoceros in every earthmover, because their perception remains intuitive. If the observation that adult artists are often trying to reconnect with the innocent perspective of childhood, The playful hybrids seen here suggest that Elizabeth hasn’t yet lost that vital connection, combining a solid design foundation with a fine conceptual wit.
Elizabeth will be a student at the Kentucky College of Art + Design.
Elizabeth Hill, “Mass Destruction”
Claire Vicars graduated from DuPont Manual
Design is prominent in Vicars’ work, most notably a poster for a theatrical production of Antigone that might be the envy of a professional. The imagery is highly evocative of Greek tragedy overlaid with romantic textures, and the visual detail of an errant black line extending up from the title is inspired in how it invited the viewer to complete the allusion to the fiery sun as a balloon, a motif that reflects the conflict between earthly and divine power in the play.
Claire will enter the Hite Art Institute BFA program at the University of Louisville.
Claire Vicars, “Antigone poster”
Brendan Taylor graduated from Eastern High School
Brendan offers evidence of one of the most crucial qualities for the young artist: observation. The detail of texture and color overlays a developing exploration of space and dimension. The connection between seeing and drawing can move to a profound level once the artist liberates themselves from a fixation on mark-making; the ability to get lost in the visceral reality of even a seemingly mundane subject such as a ceramic mug and some fruit. The relationships of the objects include the harsh contrast of very green bananas against the warm wood grain of the table and the analogous color of the mug and the table. The viewer can identify with Taylor’s absorption in the almost forensic study of all of these elements.
Brendan has applied and was accepted into the University of Louisville Hite Art Institute as a Studio Art Major.
Brendan Taylor, “Kitchen Table”, acrylic
Written by Keith Waits. Entire contents copyright © 2020 by Louisville Visual Art. All rights reserved.
In addition to his work at the LVA, Keith is also the Managing Editor of a website, Arts-Louisville.com, which covers local visual arts, theatre, and music in Louisville.