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December 2005 Exhibit
Jasmine Nieves, 8th grade student at Cambell
Middle School with the school's artwork,
"The Personal Map Project"
Robin DeCamp, teacher at Taylor Middle
School with one of her student's artwork
From left: Jennifer Allen,
Suzie Preston & Marianne Henry
Reprint of a News-Journal article by Laura Stewart
Students Shine at Art League
Volusia Artists Bring Fresh Ideas
By Laura Stewart, Fine Arts Writer, News-Journal
Daytona Beach – There’s something especially inspiring about “3 rd Idea – Progression n Time & Space.” It’s not just the sign of colorful works crowding the walls at the Art League of Daytona Beach. Nor is its appeal limited to finding themes or discovering what’s new in student art.
The display by middle- and high-school students from Volusia County shines for a simpler reason: Its fuel is curiosity and energy, fueled by fresh, fearless imagination.
As if no one before him had ever felt overwhelmed by the human condition, Pine Ridge High school senior Daniel Castilo molded his clay into a brooding figure.
Lumpen, crudely stamped with a confining grid and glazed a dull gray that wants to be silver, it is the spiritual child of Auguste Rodin’s self-absorbed “The Thinker.”
And, as the title Castillo chose makes achingly clear, the clay sculpture embodies the feelings of a person on the brink of adulthood in a confusing world: “Solemn. Silent. Susceptible.”
Collaged and painted portraits by Creekside Middle School students of Tom Evans express the wonder of an individual’s multi-faceted, hidden characteristics – and the masks the ways people mask them.
Like a kaleidoscopic photograph, Erin Weinreich reflects on complex dimensions in “Social Structure,” a piece the uses scraps of reflective paper like tiny mirrors.
And large dramatic masks of monstrous imaginary creatures made of painted papier mache, and such found objects as straw fringe by Marianne Henry’s students at the Volusia County Detention Center, seem more talismans against inner demons than their projections or decorations.
In the show’s stronger pieces, students brought their deeps feelings into play.
The girl in an acrylic painting by an unnamed Detention Center artist seems at first to start intently at the viewer.
As impossibly tall and slender as a bohemian muse by Amadeo Modigliani, she seems distant and distracted. But her focus is inward, and her appearance that of a melancholy ideal rather than of a real woman. Observations, feelings, notions so new and complicated that they can be best expressed only by abstraction animate one of the show’s most gripping pieces. Kaitlin, a student from the PACE Center, worked in only two colors when she created her dynamic untitled painting. All she needed was there: the cool green and hot red, held in check by forceful lines, shapes, field in the non-colors, black and white.
Like New Smyrna Beach High School junior Kyle Gesauldi’s jazzy photographic collage of a kitchen, “Recreation,” the abstraction works on two levels.
It acted as a blank slate for the artist’s experiences, and it communicated a youthful world view – directly and passionately.