A group artwork effort by Great Salt Bay Community School students titled “Lift Up Your Hearts” on the wall of the cafe of Rising Tide Co-op in Damariscotta on Friday, Jan. 4. (Christine LaPado-Breglia photo)
Go see the student art: I am a firm believer that it is a good thing for young students of the arts – music, theater, visual art, or otherwise – to have opportunities to display their creative endeavors to the wider public. Such things as recitals, school plays, and art exhibits in public places give kids a chance to see what it is like to be taken seriously as an artist, to feel what it is like to have a public response to what they have created.
So, kudos to Great Salt Bay Community School art teacher Karen Hight and to Rising Tide Co-op in Damariscotta for organizing and offering the current art exhibit on the walls of the co-op’s cafe, which features the work of Hight’s students.
Visitors to the cafe are greeted by a large human-shaped figure made of paper to which large paper wings have been attached. This two-dimensional piece, titled “Lift Up Your Hearts,” features numerous paper “feathers” attached to the wings, made by Hight’s students. On a number of the feathers are written uplifting words, such as “nice,” “joy,” “love,” “peace,” “hope,” and “kindness.” Some of the feathers feature rainbow colors. One resembles the American flag – red, white, and blue and the stars and stripes.
Mary Harding, the curator at the George Marshall Store Gallery in York, sits with Damariscotta artist Jaap Helder beneath the artwork of GSB students in the cafe at Rising Tide Co-op on Friday, Jan. 4. (Christine LaPado-Breglia photo)
Beneath the “Lift Up Your Hearts” piece are a number of photographs of various people standing in front of the set of wings, looking something like jubilant angels.
On the cafe wall facing Main Street are several pieces by GSB students. Eighth-grader Dean Tegereo weighs in with a watercolor, crayon, and pencil piece he made for an assignment on surrealism. The word “unearthly” and three floating eyeballs nicely capture a sense of the surreal.
Mya Bessey, a seventh-grader, offers a lovely collage piece of a peacock on a blue background, to which she added glitter and tempera paint.
For her surrealism assignment, eighth-grader Michaela La Crosse used colored pencil and marker to create an eye-catching cityscape in silhouette with a colorful upside-down flower garden posing as the sky.
Below La Crosse’s piece hangs a nicely drawn “free choice” piece, largely created in red marker, by fellow eighth-grader A.J. Aiden Jacobs. Jacobs’ drawing features a Valentine’s Day-style heart from which numerous blood vessels run, presumably to parts of a body that is not pictured.
Damariscotta’s upper Main Street streetscape is reflected in the glass covering a collage piece depicting a peacock created by GSB seventh-grader Mya Bessey. (Christine LaPado-Breglia photo)
Other work on display is equally interesting.
In addition to enjoying the student art when I went to Rising Tide on Friday, Jan. 4, I was also lucky enough to run into two fellow appreciators of the arts who were having lunch at a table in the cafe — Mary Harding, who is the curator at the George Marshall Store Gallery in York, and abstract painter Jaap Helder, a brand-new resident of Round Pond who has a studio in downtown Damariscotta. He recently moved to Lincoln County from Belfast. (More on Helder in a future column…)
The GSB student art show will run through Saturday, Feb. 2. Rising Tide Co-op is located at 323 Main St., Damariscotta. Call 563-5556 for more information.
(Christine LaPado-Breglia has written about the arts in both California and Maine. She is the recipient of two 2018 Critic’s Awards and a 2018 Local Columnist award from the Maine Press Association. Email her at clbreglia@lcnme.com or write her a letter in care of The Lincoln County News, P.O. Box 36, Damariscotta, ME 04543.)
