Portfolios typically follow a central question or theme, often relating to personal identity, social issues, dreams, emotions. It’s a topic that’s meaningful to oneself, something that ignites passion within and compels a hand to pick up a brush.
AP 2D art students have recently been tasked with identifying their own themes to dive deeper into. Junior Mia Evans explains how “our theme, or as we call them, sustained investigation questions, is a guiding inquiry that drives our year-long exploration and is centered on a certain design theme or idea that we want to explore through our art.”
The SI is typically phrased as a question, asking how one explores a certain topic using specific mediums and techniques. A total of fifteen artworks, along with writing explaining them and their connection to the SI being submitted in May to the College Board.
The artistic portion of the class follows loose guidelines based on “checkpoints where we should have certain pieces finished that are supposed to keep us on track throughout the year, pacing-wise. Besides that, we kind of have free range.”
Evans SI isn’t yet set in stone, “I will edit and refine it throughout the year based on the art that I make and the art I feel myself getting drawn to naturally.”
Her basic framework is being built as she begins working on pieces, “I know that I want my art to be about human connection. I like to make portraits, I like to make art of people connecting.”
Senior Alannys Townsend delves into the topic of “how childhood trauma affects one’s experiences throughout life.” A delicate topic to breach, “so as you can imagine, it’s uncomfortable at times to express my own experiences through random colors on a canvas. But that’s honestly my favorite part.”
Exploring these intense emotions, not just for herself, but “for anyone who has been through something and is just now learning how to cope. It’s for people who haven’t understood how to express what’s happened to them, or even can’t.”
Working with such concentrated emotion can be draining, Townsend finds a trick in painting the “heaviest emotion last.” This feeling is found within the eyes of a portrait for her, many of her portraits being left eyeless at the moment.
The gallery means to represent that even when presented with so many lows, the highs are still in there. Focusing on the way that the good and the bad only exist as parallels, “there will always be a roller coaster of emotions, and to go down, you have to go up at some point.”