Graduating to a new world, together
With no one to see the art, does the message get lost? If we can’t be with people, do we forget how to connect? No. Instead, we find new ways of sharing and understanding each other.
The students at Etobicoke School of the Arts, like other pupils honing their creativity across the city, the country and the world, usually have a year-end exhibition. They show and sell their work, hold a Portfolio Day to showcase the fruits of their labour and create connections with the larger, outside world.
This year, the Class of 2020 has taken the sale online.
“The tension with teaching and having the sale online is the loss of personal interaction with other people,” observes Matthew Varey, head of contemporary art at the Toronto high school. “We are used to engaging with brilliant, creative, humble, powerful and ambitious people every day. That is the loss I am feeling, and the one I hear from the students that is being felt most deeply.”
For Ella Webber, the just-graduated Grade 12 student and young artist who painted this portrait of “Charlotte,” her art is a way of connecting with her peers, with the people she encounters in the world each day. She creates large-scale portraits — the size of the art, she says, “increases the intimate connection that I share with it, strengthening my personal bond with my subjects and allowing my paintings to take on a life of their own.
“Through portraits I’m working to understand the complexities, nuances and possibilities of human connection.”
In exhibition, her portraits command our attention. The people in them demand we see their perspective and understand their stories.
These students are graduating to a wider world. By supporting them in their creativity and understanding the way they see the world, together we can all graduate to a better one.
To see the exhibition, learn more about these young artists or to buy a painting, go to the online sale at esava.ca. Half of the sale price goes to the students and half to the school — to inspire and support more students to create, and in so doing to encourage all of us to see the world through fresh eyes.