AN artistic year for Balcatta Senior High School students has culminated in success for them and their mentor.
Gifted and talented visual arts program students Josh Figliomeni (17), Kody Mason (18) and Sonja Drljaca (17) spent the year constructing their art on Saturday mornings with the guidance of established artist Mark Tweedie, who won the $10,000 Tony Fini Foundation Artist Prize in October.
“(The students) would work autonomously and so I would go around and critique their work and discuss it and see if we could resolve the works,” Mr Tweedie said.
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“With Sonja’s, we tried to work larger- scale. Kody is really independent, so I was just really impressed by his skills and did not have to guide him too much.
“Josh is like me. I paint and don’t necessarily overthink what the works were about, so with Josh we were trying to dissect the meaning behind his work and work out why he made the decisions he did and uncover what he was thinking.”
Balcatta SHS bought Kody’s art, which is about animal cruelty and animals rising against it, to keep on campus.
Exams are now taking up most of the students’ time and focus but they still want to pursue their artistic skills.
Josh and Kody will study animation and illustration respectively, but Sonja intends to head in a rather different direction.
“I’m doing science (next year); art is a hobby but I will probably do it as an elective because I still want to continue doing art,” she said.