University High School’s annual Sweet Sixteen Challenge is nearing its end, and the goal is to raise $16,000 for The U Fund in 16 days. The challenge ends Friday, March 30.
If you have not done so already, please click here to give online.
During this challenge, we will periodically share new glimpses into the University High School community, all tied to the number 16. This is the third in that series of posts.
From his iconic bull to his unique self-portrait, the artwork of University High School senior Tom Plant has been on display in Fairbanks Hall for much of the school year. A student in Tasha Barger’s AP Studio Art: 2-D Design class this year, Plant is in the midst of completing his 24-piece portfolio to send off to the College Board for review in May. The portfolio includes 12 breadth pieces — showing a range of approaches, using different materials on different media — and 12 concentration pieces, showing sustained investigation of a specific visual idea.
Plant’s concentration for his portfolio is clouds. He said, “I’ve always taken pictures of clouds. On my phone there are cloud pictures everywhere, and when I go back to delete photos, I never delete those. I go back to them whenever I’m looking for inspiration, and I think about how I can take this idea, this cloudscape, and connect it to form a meaning.”
Below we highlight 16 pieces of Plant’s art — some of which will be included in his AP portfolio — and his reflections on those pieces and the process of creating them.
Piece #1 — Travel Poster (Acrylic)
About this piece: “This one will be a breadth piece, I think. It’s a piece I made at Zionsville [Plant attended Zionsville High School for his freshman and sophomore years]. We had to choose a painting style, and I chose the art deco travel poster style. I took this photo in Switzerland; I thought it was such a picturesque place with the little tower in the distance. I started with the rocks (in the lower left corner), and then I moved up. I was working on creating shadows without blending. It’s just layer upon layer. It was an interesting way to paint.”
Piece #2 — Gears (Oil)
About this piece: “This one I made at Zionsville also, and it’s bigger and made with oil paint. I like this one more because it has a lot of duller, more muted colors. Using muted colors accents the brighter ones, so the gold really stands out here. The theme behind this piece was symbolism, so I focused on teamwork and how you can’t have a working machine if you’re missing one gear. All of the pieces have to work together.”
Piece #3 — “Drastic” (Ink & Watercolor)
About this piece: “This was my first journal assignment in AP Studio Art this year. The theme was ‘drastic,’ and this is the Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence. I did it all in pen. I liked how it looked in pen, but I thought maybe I should add in some watercolor to do more so I could get a bit of color in there and contrast. I’m happy with how this one turned out because it was a way to mix sketching and painting together, which I hadn’t done too much of.”
Piece #4 — “Twisted” (Watercolor Markers)
About this piece: “This journal assignment [for AP Studio Art] was ‘twisted.’ I thought, ‘Ah, yes, Don Quijote’ because I was reading it at the time, and I’d been doing a bunch of sketches randomly. I thought maybe I could turn one of those sketches into a piece. For this, I did a contrast between modern and antique. You have the ancient-looking background that looks blurred and spotted, and you have the old Spanish language represented in the letters. And then you have this cartoonish Don Quijote, which is very exaggerated with the elongated body. I used this style to convey his character, to make him and Rocinante look even more crazy.”
Piece #5 — Jar of Flowers (Chalk Pastels)
About this piece: “This was a journal assignment as well, and we used chalk pastels. I did the background on this piece last, which was the wrong idea. I started out with the jar, working with the water and with the reflection there. I moved my way up, and then I finally put in the background. I had to use a Q-Tip to fill it in. I wanted to make something conceptually light, and I’m really happy with the colors in this one.”
Piece #6 — Basketball Poster (Pen & Marker)
About this piece: “This is a poster I made for the boys basketball game vs. Tindley [for the UHS Blaze Craze Instagram page]. The concept behind this was just to make something different, something unexpected. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to portray the basketball player from below, as if he’s playing on glass.”
Piece #7 — Abstraction (Charcoal & Paper)
About this piece: “This as a breadth piece I created this year. We were working with abstractions, and the only requirements were that it had to use charcoal and paper. This one is different than all my other pieces because it doesn’t have a subject matter. I was thinking of artists like Cy Twombly and Lois Main Templeton and how they kind of incorporate writing. I wanted to do that as well, but in a way that’s personal to me. I feel like other people can take away their own individual things from this piece. If I were to have written everything out clearly, it might not have had the same effect as it does when people have to guess and think about how each part fits together.”
Piece #8 — Gateway Arch (Ink)
About this piece: “This is the Gateway Arch (in St. Louis), a piece I made with ink when I was at Zionsville. The concept behind this piece was conveying older St. Louis compared with newer St. Louis. You have the older city here on the left, showing the cranes and the start of construction, and then you have the newer city here on the right, with all the buildings and cosmopolitan aspects. This piece shows the passage of time and how those time periods are linked through the Arch – indirectly, too, because the Arch is not finished.”
Piece #9 — Landscape (Watercolor)
About this piece: “I created this piece over the summer. I had gone on a fishing trip with my uncles, and this was a still from part of a video I’d taken. I think it has a really interesting layout with the trees, how they’re so thin, and with the rippling effect of the water. This one won the student competition in the Carmel International Arts Festival this fall.”
Piece #10 — Bull (Oil)
About this piece: “Our AP art class went to Newfields [formerly the IMA] earlier this year. We were looking at abstractions, and I found this cow mask that I liked. It was really different than this; the face was really wide, and it was black, white, and red. When I came back, I started working just with the cow, the idea of the cow, and using different patterns from pieces I saw at the IMA. The background is this woodworking piece, and each of the designs in the cow’s body comes from different artifacts in the museum. The spiral design came from a bunch of pieces, and those weird eye patterns and crosses, those all appeared in the museum as well. I was into the idea of using geometric design, so I put that in here. It took a lot of experimentation to get the lines right, but I really liked the process of making it.”
Piece #11 — Self-Portrait (Charcoal)
About this piece: “This is a self-portrait. I created a self-portrait with paint over the summer that was very straight-on and boring, so I wanted to change it a little bit. I worked a lot with the triangular composition to make sure it was interesting. I wanted to make it a little uncertain, and in a way, I guess the reason I chose this expression is the same reason I choose clouds. It’s because I feel like you can’t really tell what I’m thinking.”
Piece #12 — “Perspectives” (Oil)
About this piece: “This was the first project that I did in school this year. The assignment was to do multiple perspectives, and this is one in a series of two. I did one of the ocean from above, which I’m not a fan of. This one is more zoomed in on the water. I almost like that, in a way, it looks like stone, like malachite. You have water, and you have stone. This is somewhere in the middle.”
Piece #13 — Cloudscape (Oil)
About this piece: “This piece I worked on after Winter Break, so I was inspired by winter and how it’s insanely hard to see. This is a classic Indiana landscape, with the fence on the side of a road or in a field. I wanted to make sure it was fluid, so you don’t know exactly where the horizon is or where the sky is. That’s part of the cloud idea, and why I like it in this case, because it has the meaning of uncertainty and vagueness. The border between reality and imagination sometimes does not have a clear distinction.”
Piece #14 — Pipeline (Oil)
About this piece: “This was the first painting I did for my concentration over Winter Break. I started going through my photos of clouds, and I was like ‘This is the one I’m doing first.’ I took the photo of the clouds from some sidewalk in Carmel; I zoomed in on it and worked with really a limited palette. This was where I started really thinking of narratives, also. I put in the Keystone Pipeline. The controversy and anger around that is reflected in the turbulence of the clouds.”
Piece #15 — Don Quijote (Oil)
About this piece: “For this one, I was inspired by Don Quijote and the story of chasing the windmills. I worked on the sky for this one first. I was inspired by playing with the light and the sky, and how the sky looked very distant. There’s a lot of cloudiness and fogginess, which reflects the mind of Don Quijote, who doesn’t know if he’s a real person or a knight. I added some things in from the story. You have Rocinante, his not-very-good horse. There’s his lance, which is a tree branch. You have the windmills, of course, in the distance, which he thinks are giants. I played a lot with perspective. I wanted to make it look like he was up high, looking down on everything below. This one was one of my favorites to make because it took so long, and seeing it at the end just felt like a good payoff.”
Piece #16 — Raft (Oil)
About this piece: “This is the first big project that I took on in respect to my concentration. Since I love art history so much, I was thinking of ‘The Raft of the Medusa’ by Théodore Géricault. This piece is based on the Malaysia Airlines flight, an event that we don’t have any photographic evidence of. So I put the plane in there and just made my own representation of what it could’ve been like. I reflected that in the sky, where it’s very stormy and bubbly, almost like the water.”