Student artwork on show at Parkside Gallery

Students at Peter Skene Ogden will be showcasing their work this month at the Parkside Gallery.

Titled the Eagles Nest, the show features work from a variety of students, using a multitude of different mediums such as pencil, pen and ink and paintings using acrylics and watercolours. Other pieces include pen and ink pointillism and three-dimensional sculptures done with plaster, wire, nylon, and wood.

“I’m so proud,” said art teacher Lianne Heales. “We’ve had some of the pieces in there from boys in Grade 9, and so it’s really nice to see that even at a really young level they can really dedicate themselves to achieving excellence.

“There’s even sort of assignments that the students themselves wanted in more independent work or things they were really proud of, so there’s really a wide collection of examples of art.”

This year’s art show includes a sampling of what students do in the classroom, ranging from daily warmups and practice activities as well as the projects and assignments that were done in class.

“Since we spend so much time working really hard in this room, like two-and-half hours a day, and it’s really intensive, I wanted to show some of those really simple, small activities that we do and what they can produce and how they can progress an artist along and how they can develop those skills,” Heales said.

“Some of the pieces are actually from the end of last year that were intended to go in the show and never made it and because they show an example too of what else happens in our classroom I wanted to include them.”

Student Hannah Meier, who enjoys drawing animals with pencil and charcoal, said she was excited to see what kind of turnout they get at the gallery and how people feel about what she’s presenting. She enjoys animal artwork because “they’re really fascinating and some of the textures some animals have look really nice.”

Student Rachel Thomas, meanwhile, prefers to do pieces with acrylic paints and “cartoony based more than realistic and stuff.”

Although she likes to use photo references, Thomas tries to copy the work in her own style. “It’s kind of cool to see for once having my art actually outside of my bedroom instead of sitting on a shelf sitting dusty so that’s kind of interesting,” she said.

This year Thomas has put a teacup painting and an egg drawing into the show. In reference to her future as an artist, she said, “I don’t think it will be my like full-time career option, but I’d like to do it more when I grow up.”

Heales said she was happy to show some of the fun things students do in the class that “maybe aren’t necessarily something you would normally do for an art show like our blind contour and some of these have fun with colour, but that’s part of art too. It’s having fun and enjoying yourself in what you do.”

When the art got hung, Heales said she was overwhelmed by how impressive the quality and the range was, and impressed by how much effort the students put in overall, “from the smallest little activities that we do right to the big projects they were intending to put into the show and were doing for that purpose and they put so much effort into everything.”

While many things inspire the individual students, Heales said the students were the inspiration for the show.

“The students are the inspiration like 100 percent. Yeah, that’s actually what it was. It was seeing how impressive our activities and our warmups were coming and just the work that was going in and how beautiful they were. I knew that they had to go in. But the students are always the inspiration.”

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