Self-taught poet, Henry Thoreau once said, “this world is but a canvas to our imagination.” Poetry, being a form or art, paints a picture. Amature artists and AP Art students, Korey Pearson and Kessah Headrick paint their words on a more literal canvas. The AP Art students must complete twenty-four works of art in one year. These are assigned to them through My Big Campus. They must use sixty out-of-school work hours into each semester. Much like some of the issues that are reflected in works, creating the pieces can be a struggle.

In the image below, senior and AP Art student Korey Pearson proves this to be wrong through his latest painting which was inspired by the addiction to smoking cigarettes.

“I just drew on the canvas board until I got tired of erasing. Then I told myself ‘let’s just paint,” Pearson said.
The woman with the cigarette is blowing out smoke which turns into a bird, which is metaphorical to the artist.
“I think it’s kind of ironic how air pollution and cigarette smoke are things that kill a living breathing animal that is coming out of it. What I see is someone who is trapped by an addiction. It’s kind of like a bird in a cage. Whenever they don’t have their cigarette, they feel like they’re caged in and whenever they have their cigarette and are smoking, it’s a relief for them; it’s like a bird taking flight,” Pearson said.
Through the use of different medias and colors, artists add emphasis to different parts of the piece.
“I used acrylic paint on a canvas board. I liked the blue in the blue bird, because it’s kind of an in-your-face blue. I put a little red in the background to add a darker mood to it. With all the white and gray and blue from the smoke, it shows the good and the bad from the smoker’s point of view,” Pearson said.
Many artists face challenges while creating their work.
“My biggest challenge was definitely making the human face look 3-D and to actually look like a human face and the fingers,” Pearson said.
Pearson is letting the painting speak for itself to be analyzed in various ways by different people, which is why he it is still unnamed.
“I don’t want to give it a name to take away from what it looks like. I want it to make you think,” Pearson said.

In the image above, senior Kessah Headrick, an AP Art student, chose one of the many controversial issues in our world today to be to muse of her in progress painting.
“It was titled genetics, but that might change when I finish it,” Headrick said.
Since there are many different aspects to creating a work of art such as planning, picking colors, blending and finalizing a piece can take a lot of time and effort.
“This painting has been a long time coming, I’ve been working on it since the summer,“ Headrick said.
The inspiration of her painting came from one of the most innovative scientific progressions: gene manipulation.
“[T]he main idea is that people don’t get to chose what their babies look like now, but maybe sometime in the future, they can kind of pick-and-chose what they want their baby to have as it grows. I am kind of visualizing how that can be detrimental or maybe positive, depending on how you look at it,” Headrick said.
To express to complexity of gene manipulation, the colors and the style were specifically chosen to emphasize the details.
“I took a class over the summer, and we were studying an artist who used mostly primary colors. He broke it up using white lines to show movement. I really took inspiration from that,” Headrick said.
Every piece of art presents itself with different challenges which the artist must find creative ways to create fluid transitions between the different aspects of the work.
“This is wood finish on canvas and then acrylic paint on top of that. At first, I wanted a wooden background to paint on, and then I decided that it wasn’t going to work so I just used wood finish to get the color that I wanted on canvas,” Headrick said.
Many artists have preferred materials to work with, and experimenting outside of their comfort zone helps them think outside of the box.
“Paint is not my forte, which is why I am doing this painting so that I can improve on my abilities,” Headrick said.