How to Deal with Art Competitions for Students

jeff zhou

Written After the Awarding Ceremony of the Scholastic Art Awards –

I. The Story of Y

Written and translated by Jeff Zhou on 03/1/2017 and updated on 2/1/2021

Edited by Anushka Radadia, former president of the New Jersey Young Artists Association, and current undergraduate student in class of 2024 at University of Texas at Austin

Art education not only teaches about artistic techniques, but also, an attitude towards life which helps students achieve a magnificent life in which they can prosper in. Moreover, on the road of artistic activities, artists often enjoy more than one process of artistic creation. A true artist can find “Beauty” everywhere, and anywhere. Art is not about struggling with personal gains or losses through day or night and it is not even about earning recognition or winning a prize in a contest.
Otherwise, it is difficult for us to get out of art alive.

So, in recent years, whenever I saw my students’ artworks hanging above the center stage in the ceremonies of the Scholastic Art Awards, I was always very proud of them; however, what moved me the most was still the memorable creating and teaching processes.

Founded in 1923, the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards is the largest and the most formal annual youth art competition in the United States. “…to give those high school students who demonstrate superior talent and achievement in things of the spirit and of the mind at least a fraction of the honors and rewards accorded to their athletic classmates for demonstrating their bodily skills.” As Founder Maurice R. Robinson once said.

Since their founding, the Awards have established an amazing track record for identifying the early promise of our nation’s most accomplished and prolific creative leaders. Alumni include artists such as Andy Warhol (1928–1987), Philippe Philip Pearlstein (1924-), Cy Twombly (1928–2011), Robert Indiana (1928-), etc. Students from grades 7 to 12 (ages 13 and up) all over the world can apply to participate. Scholastic collaborates with more than 100 visual and literary and artistic organizations each year to award more than $ 250,000 in scholarships to student artists and their schools.

1.

In 2014, Yi, who was only in 5th grade when she came to my studio. Her mother said that she had never studied painting, but she had a strong passion for it. However, the entrance test work she drew at her first lesson allowed me to find her talents: the composition, the ratio, the light and shadows were all OK; except for perspective, there was a problem. But it was her first time to sketch still life within an hour and a half on site...

Later, I found that Yi not only had a great understanding of art, but also had a special enthusiasm for fashion design. Since 2016, she had added two additional fashion design lessons each week. Yi's basic painting and professional fashion design lessons had been fully launched, which helped her to make rapid progress.
　　
In 2016, during her 8th grade, Yi participated in the 2017 Scholastic Art Awards for the first time. Her inked painting “You Said You Didn't Care -- Self Portrait” was competing on the same stage with her seniors and won the award of Silver Key:
　　

The creation process of "You Said You Didn't Care -- Self Portrait" was actually very inspirational. Yi's creativity and drafting were very good, but when she painted ink on the paper, due to her premature on the portrayal of the eyes too early, the whole picture had lost its charm and rhythm.

This is a common phenomenon in student assignments because they have not really learned how to observe the whole picture with the right part of the brain; instead of that, they just habitually extract their own inventory files which saved from the left half of the brain. They clearly remember that "the white of the eyes must be white and the highlight on the pupil must be the brightest". So that when they are dealing with backlighting or sidelight portraits, they tend to leave two high contrasted eyes like two lamps on the dark face which will be very creepy…

In addition, Yi used too many brushstrokes when she applied the ink on the forehead where was not dry yet. Therefore, she damaged the paper and I even saw fibers floating out a little. And I found that she had a wanted to give up this artwork.

I then told her, "Your idea is good, and your direction is correct, but the method you used to approach this is wrong. As long as you can correct the tactics and start from the overall light and shadow rendering, you can save the painting without changing the paper." Then, I made a basic demonstration of the ink portrait painting process on another piece of paper to enable the thinking process.

Sure enough, shortly after Yi adjusted her strategy, her self-portrait began to get better and better, her confidence began to soar, and her artistic inspiration began to surge. In the end, her faintly elegant brushstrokes on the hair, and her vivid poetic expression of the background, completely brought the attention of the audience out of the mistake on forehead.

In addition to her talent and her hard work, Yi's rapid progress was also due to her family's full support. When she immigrated from China in 2014, she came to my art studio with other two classmates with similar experiences with her in the same class time. They might have succumbed in the English-speaking environment for too long, so three of them talked in Chinese during the entire art lessons. While Yi was the youngest among them, and she learned drawing the last, it was so difficult for her to concentrate on drawing or painting. Later, her mother decided to change her to another class where she was alone in the studio so she could . From then on, Yi, who was strong in heart and willing to be lonely, concentrated more on learning and started to progress.

It is worth mentioning that Yi was the only one (or only two?) among my more than 100 students at that time, after each class, who washed the brush cleaning bucket which she used and then left to the next classmate. You see, a good beginning is half the battle.

In addition, back to "You Said You Didn't Care -- Self Portrait", we can also learn from Yi's success in her meticulous attention on the title/name of her artwork. I have always advised students that a good title can reflect the painter's comprehensive cultivation and overall strength. A good title can even account for 60% of the information that the painter wants to pass to the viewers. In other words, a good title can even exceed the amount of information on the canvas itself!

Yi's title "You Said You Didn't Care -- Self Portrait" perfectly embodies her inner feelings under cultural conflicts and growing pains after immigrating to the United States.

It seemed to me that the judges were first attracted by the artistic appeal of Yi's drawing on the screen, but just as they were about to click a key to leave, they looked at the subject/title a little more ---- well, a miracle happened! Their fingertips that had just rushed to the keyboard saying good-bye were suddenly frozen in the air, and then they couldn’t help but slowly go back and looked at the drawing once more. Now, they began to fall into contemplation, and they began to have a new understanding, because from behind the fancy mask and careless eyes they actually heard the voice of a new girl who longed to be home and her pains of moving to a foreign nation.

It is estimated that after reading this, you might also go back and re-examine the artwork, and start to fall into contemplation and start to have a new touch. Might you, too, hear the call of desperation of the kids who just want things to be ¨normal¨ again?

2.

Yi has participated in the Scholastic Art Awards every year since 2017. Her fashion design series with the theme of "Hidden Treasure" has won many outstanding awards from Honorable Mention to Silver Key to Gold Key in the Fashion Design category for three consecutive years.

The story of the series designs project “Hidden Treasure” is quite interesting. Yi said in 2015 that she wanted to apply for a fashion design major in the future. I asked her at the time, "What are your particular thoughts on fashion design?" I remember that Ms. Janet Chang, the editor-in-chief of the famous American fashion magazine "Harper's BAZAAR", asked me this in her amazing Manhattan office decades ago. Yi replied that she was very interested in crochet clothes. I talked to myself, hey, you found the right coach. My company was the "king" of crochet sweaters at Fashion Avenue in New York City. But I didn't say much. I knew that the kid was still very young and she was unfamiliar with the clothing industry. In order to cultivate from a sense of fashion, I suggested that she should start subscribing some fashion magazines.

Until the beginning of 2016, Yi began to study fashion design and draping techniques. One day, when she was going to start her first fashion design project, I showed her some of the recycled packaging bags which I had collected for many years:

The reason for choosing recycled packaging materials as design resources are very simple. We cherish our common living resources. Recycling waste, and turning trash into treasure are always the best direction for students in colleges to work on their projects. How to control all kinds of recycled materials is also one of the biggest challenges to the imagination. While I was in graduate school, I used to make my sculptures with broken windscreens collected from campus tennis courts, or something I found from a Salvation Army store in Minneapolis which was about three to four hours of driving time.
　　
This is indeed the case. Even with the best ideas, if we abuse our natural resources, it is honestly a crime. On October 26, 2015, the Guinness World Records officially announced that the 4,192kg "World's Largest Fried Rice" challenge held in Yangzhou City, Jiangsu Province three days ago has violated Guinness rules due to food wasting. Regarding the provision in the large-scale food record that the food should eventually be consumed by the public without being wasted, the challenge record was invalid. All the participants wasted their time and materials.
　　
Fortunately, the idea of using recycled packaging bags also resonated with Yi and inspired the DNA of her artistic creation.
　　

From my perspective, the design work of Yi, who only an 8th grader in 2017, had actually reached the level of undergraduates in the fashion design colleges. By the way, the teaching method I adopted for Yi and other art students was the same method as the ones in American colleges and universities: instead of being a "teacher", I worked more like a "coach", because I know my students so well and treat my students like adults with trust, positivity and authentic leadership. I’m not a screamer. If student has done something wrong, I want pull him/her aside and talk to him/her about it instead of making him/her feel bad in front of everyone. I will be logical and measured in the way I speak.

Such as Princeton University Women’s former Basketball Head Coach Courtney Banghart said, who has led her team to 7 Ivy League titles and 8 NCAA March Madness Tournament appearances in 12 seasons, “I always say your team plays to the personality of its leaders, so I want my team to be fearless, I want them to be relentless, and I want them to be compassionate. That’s all I’m about. Making an impact and leaving a legacy, and coaching, allow me to do that in a tangible and impactful way.” “I wanted them to know that I was there for them. They had gotten us there, and I was going to dance with the ones who brought me.”

I usually just pointed out some possible solutions or directions to the students for their reference. Then I’d stood aside like a coach, leaving the venue for my students to explore freely until they had a problem. That was the time I would call a timeout and rearrange the tactics. Because I think that only by this way that we can cultivate the true talents.

If we say that Yi's “Hidden Treasure I.” was working on paying tribute to the classic high fashion in 2017 Scholastic Art Awards, then, in her fashion designs of 2018, Yi blended fashion design with some touches of arts & crafts. After the design was completed, she smiled and said, "I really found me and enjoyed myself":

In the 2019 entry, Yi began to challenge the integration of fashion design and space composition. She started to think handling fashion as architecture which wrapping of human bodies:

By the time of the entries in 2020, Yi has been able to take the initiative and to find the unique language for young people. The design appeared younger, cooler and has more fun:

I once told Yi that if you won the prize today, you were our pride. But in case you won't win the prize tomorrow, you are still our pride. In my view, whether or not to win an award is not much different from ourselves. Because we know clearly that we have done everything right, and we have tried our best, and we learned a lot which were good enough for our life.

By this way, we could hold our heads up and say to ourselves: we respect our Art God, we respect the personality of the judges, and we respect the talents of other contestants; indeed, we still have many shortcomings, and we still have a lot of room for growth. At the same time, we also have to tell ourselves bravely that our artworks or designs are not worse than the gold medal-winning artworks or designs.

Moreover, we are full of confidence, because we know that art learning is not just techniques or for winning awards, but an attitude towards life; to let ourselves get a kind of magnificent, inside-out, and different new artistic life.

Sure enough, Yi was admitted in advance by all four colleges of art and design in the extremely difficult early admissions in 2020 and was encouraged with scholarship offers by the most schools. The School of Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), which ranks among the top art schools in the country, even has a scholarship of $100,000 package with their early admission.

Just last week, Yi's fashion design [When We Melt] once again won the highest award in the 2021 Scholastic Art Awards Regional. We are looking forward for her to winning the highest award for young artists and designers in the United States in March, 2021.

I have said in 2017, as long as she perseveres, Yi will become a world-class fashion designer, and she will definitely be able to make her contribution to the human society.

At least, when Yi stands on her runway of fashion weeks, she will remember the fiery days of today ...

　　

At least, on the road of artistic creation, Yi is still moving forward, and, enjoying...