Westford Academy presents the winning artwork of the 2020 calendar
Olivia Swaida’s entry for the Art Calendar of 2020.
November 12, 2019
Students have worked for their entries for the 2020 Art Calendar at Westford Academy. Fourteen students, out of eighty participating in the competition, had their entries chosen to be displayed for the art calendar contest. Members of the faculty visited the flag lobby, where the artwork was exhibited, to vote on the fourteen candidates for the calendar.
The monthly artwork winners are by sophomores Shobha Raguraman and Stephanie Chang, juniors Kelly Kim, Izabela Fernandes and Ciara Chan, and seniors Amanda Franco, Julia LePoer, Shannon McPhee, Amanda Murphy, Allie Lu, Peyton Henriksen, and Caeli O’Brien. Senior Olivia Swaida and Sophomore Logan Davighi are winners for the cover and back cover of the calendar.
The artwork for the 2020 Art Calendar will be up to purchase at the annual Holiday Bazaar.
Over the course of a month and a half, a variety of students from different grades and classes, these being Visual Art I and II, Advanced Honors Art, and Advanced Placement Studio Art worke, on their drawings. Kelly Fitzsimmons, an art teacher, recognized how her Visual Art I students participating in the event learned and practiced new and old skills.
“I think especially for the Visual Art I students where it’s their first year, they are learning the grid method, but not to create a realistic or photorealistic drawing. As the levels go up, even in Visual Art I, they learn how to create implied texture, such as using a variety of different pencils, drawing pencils, and other methods like blending and stamping with a kneaded eraser,” she said.
Fitzsimmons also observed how her students challenged themselves this year and how what they learned from previous classes affects what they’ve drawn. Many of the students participating come from full-year art classes.
“Each year they do the calendar drawing, they learn from the year before and they know what they liked to draw and what they didn’t like to draw. They could also challenge themselves in a different way, either it’s thinking of a more creative space in Westford that they want to draw, or they want to make the drawing more personal to them and their feelings of Westford. So, each year it gets interesting to see what people continue to enter,” she said.
