By Hailey Spaeth ’17, Co-Editor-In-Chief

While the majority of Country Day students probably spent their summer taking pictures of their acai bowls and drawing stick figures in the sand, AP and Honors students in studio art and photography were working hard on their summer projects. The strongest pieces are now displayed in the William Messer Gallery, showcasing the work of a multitude of Scholastic award hopefuls for the upcoming 2016 contest.

Honors and AP photography students were required to take ten pictures for five prompts each, having to plan, shoot, and edit fifty pictures in total. Ms. Lichty-Smith, Country Day’s photography teacher, said that Honors students had to focus on “on developing their ability to visually articulate elements and principles of design”, while AP students took the project one step further and had to develop a concept for the themes. The students were given several prompts to choose from: shadow story, portraits, landscapes that sing, surrealism, reoccurring object, and figure as a landscape.

Studio art students were also busy this summer. AP and Honors artists had to complete three large pieces and picked two of them to be in the show. One was a still life portrait, one a landscape/room piece, and finally, the students were free to choose what to draw for the last one, something that Jack Tereck ’17 called a “concentration exploration”. Senior Grace Pettengill said that her class was also required to complete “three pieces based off of an interest of [theirs]… which might later become [their] AP concentration”. Finally, they turned in their “altered books”, which studio art teacher Ms. Amy Brand named the old books the students filled up over the summer.

While the show features mostly student work, Brand and Lichty-Smith have featured some of their own independent work as well. Ms. Brand, as well as working independently, spent the summer participating in a drawing workshop at the Cincinnati Art Academy and took classes in the AP Summer Institute in Florida. The product is a life-sized self-portrait, showcasing the interior as well as the exterior of the human body, a strikingly realistic piece. She stated that her aim was to focus on “the craft of teaching… while also pursuing work that inspires [her] and putting that back into teaching techniques”.  Ms. L also worked individually this summer. She attended the Santa Fe Photographic Workshop, featuring painter and photographer Kate Breakley. She “took images… then hand painted with oil paint”.

The show not only shows showcases the talent of our advanced placement art students, but the dedication of our arts faculty to be constantly improving upon their own personal artwork and finding the best way to teach Country Day students. The summer artwork can be seen in our art gallery through the doors set right between the Upper and Middle Schools. The work of seniors Pettengill and Charlie Sachs, as well as of Ms. L and Ms. Brand, can be seen below.

 ( Ms. Lichty-Smith)

 (Charlie Sachs ’17) ( Grace Pettengill ’17)