By Olivia Janis
When I stepped foot for the first time into the Honors Visual Arts room, my eyes locked onto beautiful paintings set up on the easels in the back of the classroom. I saw paint bottles and palettes that were left on tables and the sun shining brightly into the room. I could definitely understand how an artist like senior Christine Lee would choose to sit here painting for hours. Just after I had put my backpack down, Christine came into the room and greeted me.
I showed her the painting that had caught my eye on the 2nd-floor hallway. At quick glance, you might think you were looking at a girl riding a wave on the ocean with a sun rising or setting behind her. But when you look closer you see that the wave is composed of many colorful, overlapping hands.
I explained how amazing I thought it was, and how I HAD to know the story behind it. She was very humble when I complimented her, and as she started to put on her apron, she began to explain to me the idea behind the painting, which is titled “To Sway and Stand Firm.”
“It is basically about the question of control,” she said. “What I wanted to convey through that painting is that I think that we tend to think that our lives are determined by our choices and by what we want. But if you think about it and take a step back, a lot of the circumstances or situations that we have to go through are actually created by the decisions of others.”
She explained how an assignment might take you a while, and you are forced to spend a long time on that assignment, but it was the teacher’s decision to make up the assignment and assign it to you. Christine believes that “a lot of the decisions that we make are a result of other people’s decisions for us.” In her painting, the question she wanted to explore was how much of our lives do we actually control.
Now that I had learned the story behind the piece, we got into the methodology and her artistic process. Christine has been “arting” since she can remember but she started to take art lessons during Covid, her freshman year. She has been in Honors Visual Arts since junior year, and she did a semester at the Oxbow school. To say the least, Christine has a lot of art experience, so when it came to tackling this painting she did it with ease.
Christine had painted it over the summer, and she recalled that it took her 2 to 3 weeks. “Basically the entirety of last year was me preparing for my college portfolio, and so I would go into this outside-of-school art studio and work on just art for a minimum of four hours almost every day, and then I think seven or eight hours max every day,” she explained. I told her that I was baffled by how much time she spends working on her art, and she laughed and said, “I have no life.”
During the process of creating this painting, Christine had to paint the base layer of the hands one by one, and that one challenge was getting used to painting hands. She had to focus on “just getting the proportions right and just making sure that all the colors of the hands look good together,” she said.
While Christine explained how she focused on perfecting the details of the painting to make them look realistic, she revealed that her artistic style is a realistic style. “I think that a lot of my work kind of deals with emotions, I guess, and turning realism into more real aspects,” she said.
While Christine is working, she usually likes to listen to music, but recently she started listening to more podcasts. “I Like to listen to people talking now. So I listen to a lot of audiobooks and stuff, and I just lock in,” she said.
As our interview came to an end, I couldn’t stop staring at the ginormous painting behind her, and I finally asked what it was. Christine is currently working on her senior project, a five-by-seven canvas about the theater and design production departments and how they work together. “I chose this to paint just because I think it’s really, really cool how a lot of people come together to make basically a two-hour show, just because from an artist’s point of view, painting is a pretty solitary activity,” she said. I can already tell that from the little portion I got to see, the painting is honestly breathtaking.
Christine may be taking her artistic skills elsewhere when she goes to college, where she plans to major in studio art, but she will have many ways to remember her artistic legacy at Lovett, one being the fact that this painting won two Gold Keys and four Silver Keys in the 2024 Scholastic Art and Writing awards.
Amazed and in awe by just being in the presence of someone so talented, I left Christine to continue to work on her art and get into the zone.
