Leighton, Age 10

ARTIST STATEMENT

Leighton Lozar

My name is Leighton. I am ten years old. I like playing hockey, soccer, golf, football and tennis.

I like using bumpy textures in my art. I like drawing about the wilderness. We raft on rivers and camp everywhere. I like drawing trees, water and sunsets. I need to work on drawing humans and animals but I would like to put those in my art too.

My favorite pieces are the board games we made last fall, and the assemblage boxes. I love board games – we play Monopoly, Battleship, Sorry, Dawgopoly and Dogopoly and Charades. I also play card games like War and Go Fish. My board game is called Rocky Road. There are yellow and green squares. The yellow ones are good and the green ones are bad.

Then there are cards that say what you get like “move up three spaces” or “move back three spaces.” There are some cards and spaces that are really bad, like “start over” or “go back six spaces.” It’s for up to four players and sometimes it goes by very quickly especially when our little sister is playing with us.

Now, my assemblage box is titled, “The Bird Garden.” First I wanted to make a river theme but there was only one big fish and my brother wanted it to, so we drew straws and I got the short straw. Which meant I lost. So, then I found this old old paper birds and flowers art on a wood panel and decided I should make it about birds. So then, I spray painted a night sky and then put power poles and a thing that looks like a giant tent (remember we like camping) and a tiny clay house and there are lots of leaves around. In life, there are lots of birds sitting on power lines so I put these in so birds can land on them.

I hope you come to the art show and buy some of my pieces! We are donating money to CARE: Ukraine Women’s and Children Fund. Thank you for reading this.

Winn, Age 10

ARTIST STATEMENT

Winn Lozar

Hi. My name is Winn. I am ten. I have three siblings and we all play hockey. Everyone except my mom. She doesn’t like it when the game gets rough. But it’s going to get rougher in a couple of years. I play hockey, soccer, football, basketball, baseball, tennis and golf. I’m an identical twin. My brother is Leighton. Both of us love playing sports.

Sports inspired me to make one of my favorite pieces, “Golf Clash.” I like it because it’s kinda like being a real golfer. It has greens, fairways, water, and bunkers just like a real golf course. I added cards and one card says “Play a hole with a mini golf club.” I made a teeny golf club with wire. You can pretty much play with as many players as you want. I made playing pieces like round beads for the balls, and I also used a mini golf cart for a playing piece. Scoring is like real golf which is like if you get a 3 on one hole, that’s always really good. It’s either a birdy, par or eagle. Just like real golf, you want to take the least amount of shots to get your ball in the hole.

I also liked making the 3D painting. Mine is called “Skatepark,” which I thought of by looking at it in different directions and I realized it looked like a skatepark. We drive by the Helena skatepark pretty much every day. I used pieces of wood, some covered with paper and some painted and it’s glued together. My arrangement of the shapes was pretty much random. It was fun to make “Skatepark.” It is awesome.

I also made an assemblage box. It’s about river pollution. I wish humans would stop polluting the rivers and waters. There were lots of boxes to pick from and I picked this one because it’s big and I needed a lot of room. I wanted to be able to put this wooden fish. I also wanted more room for collaging. I thought of a trash can because people need to throw their garbage in trash cans not in the rivers. Garbage can kill fish and other things living in the rivers.

You might wonder why I like making art when it looks like all I do is sports. But I love being in Grandstreet and I like art because it gives me a break from all the activities. It doesn’t take as much and it calms me down. I’m going to keep doing art my whole life because it’s just something that I love.

Jaylin, Age 11

ARTIST STATEMENT

Jaylin Oats

My family helps me a bit with my artwork but not a whole lot. Ideas just kind of pop up in my mind from anime, manga and other things I read. Sometimes the zodiac signs show up in my ideas. I’m a Leo – I think Leo’s are born in August. Leo’s are supposed to like expensive things but that’s not that important to me. I don’t think I would really have a use for them.

I’m creative with art, though I’m not that good at problem solving. I mostly stay to myself, but I am warm hearted. My personality and sometimes my emotions come across in my art. Getting negative emotion onto a piece of paper kinda helps the feeling slide off and helps me feel calm.

I have a bunch of notebooks, but I don’t allow anyone to touch them or look at them. Not even a glimpse. That’s because I do artwork from my imagination in those and through the people I’ve talked about it to, they say it sucks and they hate it so I keep it secret.

I do one-on-one with Maureen in the printmaking studio on Saturdays. I enjoy printmaking with Maureen because printmaking was at first hard for me, but being with just her really helps.

One of the techniques we use is cutting figures out of a magazine. After that we figure out where the cutouts go in the design before we put on the ink. We roll on the ink and when we think it’s good, we draw designs into the ink, then place the paper character you’ve chosen on top of the inked plate. Then we print it using a printing press. That is a satisfying way to make art!

“Craziness” is another piece I really like. I made it from strips of sheet music and old stories. I cut up the papers and glued them to a panel of wood I had painted black. Then I used different things as stencils (like a honeycomb furnace filter cover or some cardboard with shapes cut out) and did lots of spray paint colors in layers. It reminds me of how crazy my brothers are and they have a lot of mixed emotions. One could be angry, and one could be frustrated. The piece has lots of emotions too.

As an adult, I think I might do more detailed anime art and do graffiti. Graffiti was so fun for me when we did it as a group with Maureen. A guy came to graffiti alley when we were there and he was one of the professional artists who made murals there, and he showed us how to do a graffiti technique. He made a wasp or a bee in his style. He told us how he got his ideas. I might want to do graffiti murals but I would ask permission.

So now that I’m done talking about how I made my art, I would like you to enjoy the other students’ art plus mine. Thank you for coming to the 1+1=1 Gallery art show.

Madeline, Age 10

ARTIST STATEMENT

Madeline Schnittgen

Hello. My name is Madeline, and I’m 11 years old. I’ve led a strange path in my life, it’s unlike Mary Poppins. I have JIA which stands for juvenile idiopathic arthritis-expialidocious; even though the sound of it … it’s not always precocious it’s just arthritis for kids. I have six pets. My mom’s name is Laura. She’s a Drama teacher. I have been in two of her plays and watched people practice for shows. Because of that sometimes I’m a bit extra. My dad is a school counselor, wrestling and football coach.

I really enjoyed making the 3D and layered paintings. I liked the 3D painting because it was completely random, what shapes and colors you were going to get and you had to work with that and create art. The layered paintings had their own unique qualities of taking paper and figuring where it went or what it was going to be. Although it was possibly meant to be a challenge, it was fun for my brain to take what I saw and make art out of it. I enjoyed taking the pieces of paper and saying to myself, “Okay, that can be the rocks and that can be the lumber being carried off to be paper and that can be the trunk and the branches and these colorful bits can be the tree to resemble that no fruit can look the same just like people’s personality.”

My very favorite art project this year was the assemblage box because you can make a statement, like Joseph Cornell did. He made an assemblage that stated, “Stop killing tropical birds for fancy hats.” My piece, “Unfamiliar Sights,” is about global warming. It’s a real problem because it sure isn’t going to stop itself. I’m both concerned about the earth and animals as well as us surviving. The reason it’s called “Unfamiliar Sights” is because there is a mountain goat, a wolf, and zebra in a grassland with hazy sky, and in the window of the container is a nice birch tree forest to show what it looked like before we cut down the trees in the grassland. I also really enjoyed this piece because no one can stop me from saying what needs to be said in my art.

I love art so much you could say it’s my secret friend because it means so much to me. When I’m upset or maybe when I’m bored out of my skull on a road trip somewhere, with my mom listening to whatever, all I have to do is take out my drawing materials and sketchbook and draw what I feel like. Art isn’t just drawing or painting – it’s everywhere you look just like a little friend tucked in the scenery of a hazy grassland.

Thank you for supporting me as an artist and CARE which has a special fund for Ukraine women and children.

Ciana, Age 12

ARTIST STATEMENT

Ciana Williams

Hi my name is Ciana ummm … I am 12 years old. In my free time I enjoy practicing ballet (I got my pointe shoes this year so that is really exciting!) I’ve done ballet for twelve years and finally got my pointe shoes; it hurts a little bit, but it’s worth it!

I also like to draw and skateboard. I like skateboarding because when you go down a hill, it feels like you are flying.

Dancing influences my drawing. Because I have had to be serious about practicing my dance, I learned to be serious about practicing my art. Maureen always tells us if you want to get good at something you have to practice! Also, some places that I get ideas of what to draw are probably like what I am wanting to do right now – like dance. Or another thing that inspires me is looking around me and drawing what I see – like a really interesting plant or something I’ve never seen before.

I like drawing what I see because you can just look around and pick a random thing. I usually try to make my drawing look as close to the object as possible. When I’m able to paint or draw and be alone doing whatever I want to, I think I can better express who I am. I have a good sense of humor, I’m creative and kind of quiet. Sometimes my art is just like that.

Ok, sooo, one of my favorite mediums is acrylic paint and I like acrylic painting because the brush is like floating across the paper or canvas. I also really enjoy linocut printmaking. It’s nice just cutting away the block. I made a honey bee linocut that I really love. It has the word Bee in one wing and the word Kind in the other wing. I’ll probably keep doing printmaking all my life.

Not to change the subject but … a piece I really like is “I’m Not Tropical, but Do You Want to Surf?” I got inspired to make this because I just wanted to go to the ocean. Also wouldn’t you like to go to the ocean? I came up with that title because a crow doesn’t normally live in tropical climates and here it is surfing!

Okay, next I need your opinion: do you think that my art is playful or in motion? I think so, but I’m wondering if you see that in my art. Thank you for reading this and taking the time to come to the Open House. If you buy something from any of us, some of the money goes to our favorite non profit organizations.