High school students in the region sometimes win awards for their academic achievements. Recently, the Washington state school superintendents’ office recognized students for their artistic accomplishments. The list includes two students from Mt. Spokane High School.This year’s annual Washington state student art show was moved online this spring with your host, state superintendent Chris Reykdal.
“Today we are live on Facebook with the 48th annual art show," he said. "You’re going to see talent from our students all over the state. It’s going to be an incredible time. You are going to be inspired. You are going to be impressed and you are going to want to meet these artists one day.”
One of those inspirational students is Linsey Scarlett, a Mt. Spokane High School student who won the Washington Association of School Administrators award for her pencil sketch “Contours of Flathead.”
“She has tremendous art talent. It’s sad because she actually doesn’t want to go into the art field. But ever since I started working with her, she just picks up on techniques and mediums so fast. She goes to a place called Art Salvage and she’ll get these topographical maps. She was really interested in doing some map drawings this year and that was her first map drawing that she won the award with. It was a portrait of a friend, done in graphite, and she used the lines of the map to mimic the topography of the face," said her Mt. Spokane art teacher, Jenne Hatcher.
“I really fell in love with this technique because it can kind of portray humans and our environment by merging the contours of the face with the contours of our landscape using lines that are already present on the map," Scarlett said.
Also on the winners list, Scarlett’s peer at Mt. Spokane, Anthony Browning. He won an honorable mention for a pencil and oil pastel piece that he calls “Chronophobia.”
“It takes place in a dystopian London where clocks are on the faces of people. It’s everywhere in their society and all of the clocks are telling a different time," he said.
His teacher, Angelika Wilson-Wipp, calls Browning’s award a big deal, in part because this is not his usual art medium.
“Anthony, last year, was doing 3-D sculpture and this year, because of Covid, we weren’t able to do much 3-D work because students weren’t able to leave much in the classroom because we never knew from day-to-day whether some students would be quarantined or not, so Anthony completely shifted to 2-D and made some really fantastic art, some of it layered collage, incorporating his 3-D abilities. Now we’re back a little bit working with clay as things have normalized a little bit at our school," she said.
“I hope to incorporate art into the design of buildings in my future because I like Art Deco. It was a very beautiful look, so adding some of that back into modern architecture would be interesting and fun," Browning said.