‘The Portrait Experience’ showcases 81 student self-portraits
Currently hanging in the Price and Merle Galleries at the South Arkansas Arts Center are 81 painted self-portraits of high school students.
“The Portrait Experience” was a collaboration between Lisa Burton Tarver, Maria Botti Villegas and Sarah Beth Howard to bring the self-portrait experience to the high school art classes.
Howard, the El Dorado High School art teacher, said when she met with Tarver and Villegas, there was an “instant connection.”
“Adolescence are particularly interested in the self, it’s a physiological and educational fact that they have to start figuring out who they are as individuals,” Howard said. “So what better way for them to explore that than in a self-portrait … but it’s also the most intimidating way to explore it.”
She said when she walked into the gallery Friday during the reception, she started crying.
“I have done a lot as an artist and an art teacher, but for me, right now this is the pinnacle of my career,” Howard said.
Villegas, an artist in education teacher and visual arts instructor at SAAC, said the students began working on their portraits in March, and they finished them in May.
“It was a very intensive teaching because many of these kids have not had an experience like this before,” Villegas said. “Some of them were going to be seniors so they were not going to be able to do this again probably in their lives, so that was important for us to push them to the outcome.” Howard said they showed the students many different examples of artists and self-portraits, “and then
just challenged them to try to express themselves in paint.”
The project began with Tarver’s photographs. Tarver, a local photographer and Arkansas artist in education teacher, took photos of each student for them to draw from. She said when she walked into the gallery Friday, “it was magical.”
“The body of work is just off the scale talent that we think should be in a museum in New York,” Tarver said.
Villegas said this project was a challenge for the students and she
described it as a type of therapy.
“Of course I wanted a realistic picture of them, but the idea was expression of self,” she said. “They chose the colors, they chose different positions, so they could really find themselves in the portraits.”
The paintings will hang in the galleries at SAAC through Sunday.
For more information on “The Portrait Experience,” call the SAAC office at 870-8625474 or visit saacarts. org. SAAC is located at 110 E. Fifth St., El Dorado.