Spring weather, beautiful surroundings inspire budding artists
Young artists bore the work of their hands to the gymnasium as the church bell tolled 11:30.
The two hours since they started had flown by, and now 75 sixth- through eighth-graders from nine Catholic schools were turning in their diocesan Sketch Day entries for schools in the Osage Region.
The annual springtime event, held this year in Westphalia, was one of four throughout the diocese — the others in Arrow Rock, Hannibal and Jefferson City.
“This was a very good experience,” stated Elizabeth Veasman, a seventh-grader at Visitation Inter-parish School in Vienna.
“That’s what it’s all about: experience,” said Joyce Weidinger, an art teacher in her 10th year at Visitation.
Artistic inspiration radiated from inside and outside St. Joseph Church and the surrounding hilltop community first settled in the 1830s.
Cloud cliffs retreating back and forth from the horizon wrought intense overtures of light and shadow. Sister Claret Feldhake of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, art teacher for St. Joseph School in Westphalia, St. George School in Linn and St. Mary School in Frankenstein, left her dad in charge of interceding for good weather.
Clarence Feldhake, who died in 1974, did not let her down. There was wind but no rain.
In the gym after deadline, participants perused each other’s artwork as the judges arrived.
“The hardest time of the whole day is between when the kids go to lunch and when they come back here,” Sr. Claret noted. “That’s all the time the judges have to do their work.”
To Sonya Walker, art teacher at Fatima High School in Westphalia, and Vivian Carwile, who taught art in Catholic schools for 15 years, fell the task of evaluating each student’s work and identifying the best of the best.
They took into account such things as overall composition, good use of whichever medium the artist was using, and whether the student actually completed the artwork.
Ms. Walker referred to the elements and principles of art.
“If you’re making bread, the elements are your ingredients, and your principles are the recipe — things such as texture, line quality, and color,” she said. “So you look at things like unity, good composition, whether it’s something interesting, something unique. How do you create depth on a flat surface? That sort of thing.”
“And making sure they use the entire space,” Ms. Carwile added. “They need to fill their space.”
Ms. Carwile brought students to previous Sketch Days while teaching art at St. Joseph School, St. Mary School, St. Francis Xavier School in Taos and St. Joseph Cathedral School in Jefferson City.
To help students prepare, she started by having them produce their artwork on large sheets of paper.
“That’s actually a hard thing for students to do when they’re used to drawing on desk-size paper,” she said.
“And we would go outside and do practice drawings, plain air, trying to get them to see what would make a good composition,” she said. “And I’d go around and give them hints on how to create texture like rocks and tree bark.”
She would help her students zero in on a slice of the giant panoply of inspiration around them.
“You have to break it down, because you only have two hours to finish,” she noted.
Ms. Walker agreed that keeping track of time “and being able to finish on time” are essential on Sketch Day.
In this case, the students got quarterly reminders from the bell tower.
Planning ahead helped, too. During the 45-minute drive to Westphalia, the Visitation art students talked about the medium each planned to use.
“You have to pick a medium — like oil pastel, colored pencil, watercolor, pencil, charcoal, felt-tip, oil pastel, chalk pastel,” Miss Veasman.
Her teacher, Mrs. Weidinger, has 15 art students. She selected two eighth-graders, three seventh-graders and three sixth-graders to go to Sketch Day based on who stayed up to date on their sketchbook assignments.
“Whoever had the most points in their sketchbooks got to go,” she said. “I thought that was a very fair way of doing it.”
Visitation sixth-grader Brayden Ewers noted from experience that it’s important to draw the inside of his subject first, then move on to the outside.
“I drew the outside and didn’t have enough time to draw the inside,” he said.
He’s still happy with his work. He used colored pencils to depict a cross made of shattered glass outside the church.
Sixth-grader Claudia Wieberg said studying art has helped her learn skills such as drawing straight lines and blending complimentary colors.
“It helps you match colors and put things together if you do interior design or something like that,” she said. “And it helps you appreciate the details that go into building and art.”
Citing some gorgeous architecture and a springtime bed of tulips near their schoolyard, the Visitation Inter-parish School students agreed that they’d like to host a regional Sketch Day sometime.
“The stained glass windows in church are beautiful,” one student stated. “And the Mary statue at school, too.”
