At Evelyn Walker’s senior art exhibition in the library, you won’t see something you have come to expect of an art display in a museum: titles. “I prefer to honor the feeling and overall experience of each work because I feel that is what people resonate more with,” she explained.
On March 13, Evelyn’s art will be displayed to showcase her work as a senior. The exhibit will last until April 11, giving students plenty of time to admire the pieces she has poured so much into.
One of her most personally meaningful pieces is “a very abstract take on female teenage emotions.” The piece, which has been exhibited in the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Downtown San Diego, is an amalgamation of “fake eyelashes, fake nails, and anything I thought would be cool to add.” While she “held little expectation for the outcome,” she was met with a lot of positive feedback, including from History Teacher Dr. Will Peters and Ms. Wepsic, the latter of whom believes that “For someone as young as [Evelyn] was, she seemed to have a deep understanding and maturity rarely shown, especially with a challenging topic like that.”
Like many, Evelyn didn’t think much of her art early on. “I started making art, as everyone does, in elementary school with hand-print turkeys,” she said. However, Bishop’s was where she really began to grow. Visual Arts Chair Ms. Elizabeth Wepsic remembers teaching Evelyn in 8th grade during a “Street Art” class, and has been involved in her growth as an artist ever since.
Evelyn explained that “through art rotations, X period meetings, and required art classes, I felt most drawn to visual arts, specifically drawing and painting and studio art,” and that Ms. Wepsic “is so talented as a teacher because I always felt like I had just the right amount of guidance as well as space to be my own person.”
These classes were an incredibly important space for Evelyn, allowing her to make art that lets her explore her own emotions and communicate them. “In the beautiful, sunroofed art classroom I feel at peace and inspired to create,” she said.
This is what draws Evelyn to art: “what I love most about art is the way it prompts introspection in ways that I am often unconscious to,” she explained. “My hands and mind connect to make something uniquely mine every time. Doing art more routinely through high school has been such an outlet for me because it still challenges my mind in a satisfying way, but offers a lack of pressure to be perfect.”
While she has been creating drawings and paintings for many years, Evelyn decided to showcase her art this year to share her body of work as a collection so that she and others can see it “all together for the very first time.” Among the many pieces that will be displayed, quite a few feature flowers, as “there is a calm beauty and grounding quality to them,” and “they are also very fun to make because no one flower is the same and there are a million possibilities for how they turn out.”
But despite this common thread, Evelyn’s art is not limited by one motif or theme. “In honoring my art as a space with little boundaries, I have let myself be inspired by many things,” but ultimately “there is a common factor of nature and a whole lot of flowers!”
One of her other favorite pieces is one that required her to “watercolor each flower, cut them out, and assemble them together and then onto the canvas.” Like her aforementioned piece about female teenage emotions, this one didn’t begin with a plan, which is something she loves about art: “I love the spontaneity of trying things and intuitive design.”
But not everything she makes is busy and spontaneous; showcasing her versatility, another piece, featuring different types of flowers, “offers a digestible, calming feeling … a nice contrast to some of [the] busier pieces.”
This capacity for evoking such different emotions might in part be driven by her varying creative process. “No start is ever the same,” she said; however, she always comes back to bits and pieces. “I have made some in one sitting, but edits, adaptations, or add ons are always made. I think there is a lot of beauty in intermittent creation because it allows you to see the piece with a new perspective each time you come back to it.”
In visiting her exhibition, Evelyn hopes that viewers “think whatever they want to when they walk through … because it’s theirs to interpret.” The ambiguity is by design: “Sometimes I don’t even make sense of my artwork ever, it just is.” It is meant for people to experience in their own way, and ultimately, Evelyn’s wish is that “people find it beautiful, as any artist does.”
