| Chalk it up
St. Mary's School students Jeff Wilkinson, left, and Riley MacGraw re-create Russian artist Sonia Delaunay's "Electric Prisms" on the sidewalk at Grace Christian School in Medford Thursday. Their artwork was part of Grace Christian's Chalk Drawing Festival. Chalk art draws on masters Students recreate famed masterpieces By MELISSA MARTIN Chalk dust was flying and knees were getting stiff as a group of seventh-graders turned gray sidewalks into colorful masterpieces. The 24 students from St. Mary's and Grace Christian schools re-created 11 famous art works Thursday during Grace Christian School's first Chalk Drawing Festival. "It's fantastic," said MaKenzie Ennis, stepping back to admire the chalk replica of Vincent van Gogh's "Starry Night." "I'm proud of it because I did it with my friend." Ennis and her friend, Crystal Zinzer, both Grace Christian students, used a fat stick of brilliant purple on their section of the sidewalk, smearing it with their hands for a smoother look. Their faces and jeans were covered with colorful chalk dust. Jeff Wilkenson and Riley MacGraw of St. Mary's also took a moment to step back from their reproduction of "Electric Prisms," a 1914 oil painting by Sonia Delaunay. "You can tell what kind of person the artist was by the colors they chose," MacGraw said. Before they started enlarging the work onto an 8-foot concrete canvas, the two boys folded a picture of the masterpiece into four quadrants and tackled the project by sections. "I like working outdoors and having lots of room to move around," Wilkenson said. The Chalk Drawing Festival was modeled after an Italian tradition dating back to the 16th century, says Susan Whipple, art specialist at Grace Christian School. Whipple organized the festival to culminate her students' nine-week study of postimpressionists from the early 1900s. "I want the students to be able to recognize some of the wonderful paintings by the artists in this era," she said. The St. Mary's students were from a semester-long class studying arts and crafts from lost civilizations and ancient cultures, said Betsy Moore, art instructor. Grace Christian seventh-graders Taylor Mondale and Brian Johnsen outlined a pastel green tree with black chalk to give it more intensity as they recreated Pablo Picasso's `Mediterranean Landscape". "His paintings are weird and abstract and that's why I like them," Mondale said. Down on all fours and nearly blistering their fingers, the madonnari, or street painters, as their art instructors called them, worked for three hours. "My fingers are burning off," Nick Rote of St. Mary's said as he bent over the replica of "I And The Village" by Marc Chagall. His chalk partner, Tara Batzer, only wished she had more time. "I love drawing stuff with chalk," Batzer said. "I draw in my driveway at home." |
