By Madeline Pulliam, Staff Reporter
Sophomore Angela Wang’s artistic skills have been acknowledged in three competitions and featured in an art anthology book, which is a collection of the winning artwork from the competitions. She uses different mediums including pencils, watercolors and oil paints.
“I really liked coloring since I was a kid and when my brother found his art teacher, I joined him and started taking art lessons, and I’ve been doing that for about two years now. I just became more and more interested in art as I went along,” Wang said.
Wang and her family moved from China when she was 10 years old and went looking for an art teacher for her older brother, Jonathan Wang. She began taking lessons with her and her brother’s art teacher, and eventually entered the Celebrating Art Contest for the first time when she was in eighth grade in the spring of 2022.
Celebrating Art is a national contest that aims to provide students with the opportunity to win prizes or get published and teachers with the opportunity to win art supplies for their classrooms. Wang is also waiting to hear back from the Ocean Awareness Contest in November and is planning on entering another contest in December.
“It’s given me a great outlet for my creativity since usually during the week I’m at school which is more like statistics and logic which is not very creativity oriented,” Wang said. “At art lessons, I get to be able to use my imagination and my creativity.”
Wang looks forward to her art lessons with her classmates. She is greatly inspired by her more experienced peers. Many of them have been making oil paintings for multiple years, so she uses their artwork as motivation to keep painting and getting better with each lesson.
“Every day I go into my class, and I see everyone doing amazing works around me and I get inspired to keep training my skills because I know that one day I can grow and become an artist like that,” Wang said.
Wang said that she has also learned new virtues through her art. The long amount of time involved in oil painting has been a major contributing factor to this development.
“I love what art can do for me,” Wang said. “I became more patient. I learned to be more observant. I became more meticulous in my methods and what I do to be able to achieve something that I want into art that is satisfactory for me.”
Madeline Pulliam can be reached at [email protected].
