Senior Abigail Hart earns a National Scholastic Award in art

With an enjoyment for art and a lack of interest in the electives being offered at her middle school, senior Abigail Hart settled with an art class, and she has continued on that journey ever since. 

     Currently, Hart is enrolled in AP Art with Babette Grunwald and Painting with Erin Wallace. However, little did Hart know that during her last year of high school she would be a National Scholastic Gold Medal recipient for her art piece “Silver Lining.”

     “It was crazy … When I first tried to look on the day it was posted the whole website was down because everyone was on it and looking,” she said. “So it wasn’t until a day or two after that I got to look.” 

      The National Scholastic Art and Writing contest puts artists that have won a gold key at the state level into a chance to compete nationally. In June, her painting will be on display in Carnegie Hall in New York City, New York. Hart is one out of six competitors from Oregon to receive a gold medal in 2023, and both Grunwald and Wallace are very proud of her achievement. 

     “I think artists are often kind of quiet and go a little bit unnoticed in our field,” Wallace said. “And so it’s great when the art students get some recognition for their hard work.”

     Hart says that when it comes to “Silver Lining” it started with some digital sketches to practice doing side profiles. A similar version later made it onto the canvas featuring a Native American woman.

     “I love her paintings. I think she has a really good way of making them look like they’re screen printings,” Grunwald said. “I also really liked her sketchbooks where she’s done people from different races. She’s really learned how to draw the features on the faces.” 

     Hart says that when it comes to well known paintings they often don’t usually feature women and women of color; however, this isn’t explicitly what causes her to paint or sketch a particular person a lot of the time.

     “It’s important to add this kind of representation so people can feel like they’re seen as people,” Hart said.   

     For the future, Hart says she plans to continue following her journey and passion for art by attending Pacific Northwest College of Arts in Portland, Oregon. She has hopes of finding a career as an artist. 

     “I think this has been a really strong start for her here at West and [it] seems like winning this award has been a great kind of affirmation of her talent,” Wallace said. “And people getting that recognition I think is gonna really carry her into her college years.”