Lyme-Old Lyme senior expresses herself with art
Claudia Mergy plans to study subject at UCLA
Old Lyme — When Claudia Mergy was a young girl, she was constantly drawing.
Her parents noticed and took her at age 8 to art classes at the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts. As she progressed through art classes within the close-knit community, she discovered she had a talent for art that she should pursue.
At Lyme-Old Lyme High School, her art teacher, William Allik, helped her realize just how strong her passion for art is.
“He just gave me the space I needed and the materials I needed, and he just said, ‘Go, have at it,’” said Mergy, a senior at Lyme-Old Lyme High School who lives in Old Lyme.
Throughout her high school years, her artistic talent developed from more photo-realistic work to paintings that showed her brushstrokes and thought process.
Mergy, 18, plans to attend the University of California, Los Angeles, and major in fine arts after graduation.
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Mergy, who enjoys still-life painting, said art is an opportunity to express herself.
The process of painting is time-consuming, she said. It includes setting up the still life, playing around with colors and lighting, figuring out a composition and then painting.
But the final product — and the moment she realizes she has created something that people can connect with — is well worth the effort.
“Just kind of doing something different and that people have never really seen before is really neat — to look at something and be like, ‘This doesn’t look like anything anyone has ever put out there,’” she said.
Her artwork has earned awards, including state and national
Groton — As a couple dozen girls gathered around, a vice president from Ensign-Bickford Aerospace & Defense in Simsbury who has worked on the Orion Space Program asked the group what they had learned from a hands-on engineering exercise in which more than a few bottle rockets had, in her words, experienced “structural failure.”
“Size does matter,” said one student.
“You need more time to make it,” ventured another.
“You have to be very smart,” offered up a third.
Workshop leader Meryl Mallery nodded and added that designing a rocket is all about power: “You have to have enough energy inside the rocket to counteract all that weight.”
More than 80 local female middle schoolers ramped up their power to innovate Thursday by spending up to five hours at CURE Innovation Commons doing a deep dive into science, technology, engineering and math workshops sponsored by the Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame.
The students, from STEM Magnet Middle School and West Side Middle School in Groton and St. Joseph School and Benny Dover Jackson Middle School in New London, heard from an all-female group of mentors about what it’s like to be an engineer, entrepreneur and drug developer, along with a host of other science- and math-related jobs.
Sarah Lubarsky, executive director of the Women’s Hall of Fame, said currently only about a quarter of STEM-related jobs in the United States are occupied by women, and only 12 percent of its own inductees were in STEM fields. She would like to see that percentage increase substantially over the next few decades, encouraged by programs like the “STEMfem” workshops her group is sponsoring around the state.
“When girls are introduced to STEM jobs in high school, it’s almost too late,” said Emma Palzere-Rae, Ignite program manager at Thames River Innovation Place, which hosted the program.
This was the second year STEMfem had come to CURE Commons, a facility that Lena Harwood Pacheco, director of education for the Women’s Hall of Fame, called a “real professional workspace.”
Schools were invited to Thursday’s program based on their intensive STEM programs. Students were chosen to attend by each of the schools, with a total of 49 from Groton schools and 32 from New London.
Participating companies and organizations included Ensign-Bickford Aerospace & Defense, Pfizer Inc., Bits and Pixels LLC, Pratt & Whitney and CareerInSTEM.
Workshop titles were “Crazy for Rockets and Space,” “Think Like an Engineer,” “STEM Shark Tank,” “Play with Arduino and the Internet of Things” and “STEM Career Exploration.”
The Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame, at www.cwhf. org, is a statewide organization funded entirely by donations from individuals and foundations.
“We’re all about providing role models of professional STEM women,” said Lubarsky, the hall of fame director. recognition from the Scholastic Art Awards.
“She’s always had a tremendous facility for both drawing and painting and a great sense of design,” Allik said. “She composes things beautifully and apparently effortlessly.”
He also said she has a great dedication to her work and possesses a unique ability to work independently, which has been a huge part of her success.
“She’ll start things here and bring back finished masterpieces,” he said.
Along with painting, Mergy enjoys creative writing and has taken online creative writing courses through Johns Hopkins University. She also has explored singing and playing the guitar, fashion journalism and design, and crew. Fashion is another way to express herself, and she enjoys creating different looks.
She said she tries to focus on the things she likes to do and being who she wants to be.
“I think it’s good that everyone has their own sense of who they want to be and who they are,” she said. “I think everyone needs to show a little bit of individualism, or else we’re all just kind of the same, walking around looking the exact same.”
“I think everyone has something in themselves that is different than anybody else, and I just think it’s important for everyone to show that,” she said.
In the future, Mergy hopes to travel to Italy and France to study art to help improve her own work. She is exploring future careers and hopes to discover her path at UCLA but expects it will be something along the lines of art.
“I want to be able to find something that I can do for a living and that I can look at and say this is fun, this is not work — and something that will make me a better person every time I go to work,” she said.