Students at Thomas Haney secondary will be celebrating the fine arts at their school for a second year.
Grade 12 students Taryn Antalek and Ava Buckley have organized the second annual Thomas Haney Galleria of Fine Arts that will feature a night of art, live music, film performance and light refreshments all catered by the school’s culinary arts department.
This year there will be art from students in the new Media Design program with an emphasis on Adobe programs like Photoshop and InDesign.
“It’s just a new kind of program allowing us to create new kinds of art,” explained Buckley.
The inaugural event saw between 400 and 500 people who came out to see the work of the aspiring young artists.
Buckley will have around seven charcoal portraits of women involved in politics on display.
One will be of Ilhan Omar, the Somali-American Congresswoman for Minnesota, and also Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex, Congresswoman for New York. She has also done a portrait of Jody Wilson-Raybould, former Veterans Affairs Minister and Associate Minister of National Defence, who recently resigned from the Prime Minister’s cabinet.
Surrounding each portrait are flowers done in gouache paint, a type of water-media consisting of natural pigment, water, a binding agent and sometimes additional inert material.
“Most of my art is really into social justice issues and it kind of gives my art a purpose. It’s where I find my results are the best when I have a back-story to my artwork,” explained Buckley.
“I’m really inspired by these women and I think they are kind of like the future. It’s really awesome to be able to present them in my own way,” she said.
Grade 12 student Kyndra Burton will have a series of acrylic landscapes on display inspired by the painter Bob Ross in addition to a couple of animal portraits. Burton loves to paint scenic shots from across B.C.
“I get to look out my window everyday and get to paint what I see which is kind of a cool thing,” she said.
She will also have a series of LGBT-positive colour photographic portraits on display.
Savannah Hutton, a Grade 12 photography student, will have between five and seven nature inspired, colour prints on display.
“Last year I made all of my pictures all in black and white. So this year I decided to go with all of them being in colour,”she said.
“They are all outdoors and there are different ones in the forest and of animals,” she explained.
Grade 11 student Bevin Tisdale, is in the Media Design and Photography program at the school. She works in multiple mediums, but for the show she is going to make digital art her own characters using Photoshop.
“I really like comic book style and I have my own comic book characters but I also do some unrealistic portraits of people, like I’ve done portraits of my friends and celebrities that I like,” she said.
Aurora Weston, Grade 12, will be representing the school’s music program and she will be playing the piano on stage in the rotunda.
Kaleb Jansen is also in the Media Design program and will have recreated movie posters including The Usual Suspects and The Evil Dead done in Photoshop and also an album cover on display.
In addition there will also be between five to ten short films screened throughout the evening.
Select students will have their original artwork and prints for sale.
And the culinary arts program will have samplers from their own food line that can also be purchased with the money going back into the culinary arts program.
The second annual Thomas Haney Galleria of Fine Arts takes place between 6:30 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. on Feb. 28 at Thomas Haney secondary, 23000 116 Ave. in Maple Ridge.
Admission is by donation which will go back into the fine arts department and towards future shows.
For more information call 604-463-2001.