North Voice: Talent on display for OSPI regional art contest

Hundreds of Washington high school students sent their drawings, paintings, photos and ceramics to the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction for its annual art contest. Nine Spokane County students were named regional winners, and two of those went on to win awards at the state level.

Two students at Mt. Spokane High School, Linsey Scarlett and Anthony Browning, were named as regional contest winners, as was Quentin Swett of Deer Park High School. At the state level, Scarlett also won the Washington Association of School Administrators Award and Browning won an honorable mention.

Anthony Browning, a senior, said he’d entered the OSPI art contest a couple years ago and decided to do it again in his final year of high school. “It was the last year I’d be able to do anything,” he said. “The year had been a rough one and I wanted to go out on a high note.”

Browning submitted a piece done in oil pastels and graphite pencil titled “Chronophobia.” It’s in black and white and the setting is World War II London, when the city was the frequent target of air raids, he said. He replaced faces and many other objects with clocks. Each clock tells a different time, because people never knew when the next attack would be, Browning said.

He’s been doing art in some fashion since he was three, though his early efforts were mostly sharks and Godzilla. “Throughout the years I’ve gotten better,” he said.

He’s also experimented with a variety of mediums. “I use quite a few,” he said. “I’ll use cardboard. I’ll use crayons. But I’ve grown to really, really like oil pastels. You can get a lot of detail, but you can also cover a lot of space quickly with vibrant colors.”

Browning is considering a career as a design architect. “I would like to bring back styles like art deco, older styles with more variety,” he said.

His teacher, Angelika Wilson-Wipp, said Browning used to do more sculptures before the pandemic forced him to focus on 2-D art. “He’s just a really fantastic artist, very creative,” she said.

Linsey Scarlett submitted a graphite drawing of a woman on a 1966 map of Mount Thompson-Seton, Montana, titled “Contours of Flathead.” Her teacher, Jenne Hatcher, said Scarlett goes to art salvage shops to find old maps and then creates her art by using a graphite pencil to accentuate certain lines on the map to create a picture. It involves a lot of detailed work examining the picture of the person she wants to reproduce and the map itself.

“She’d study the maps for a long time,” Hatcher said. “She’s absolutely meticulous. She doesn’t miss a detail.”

Scarlett plans to pursue a career in nursing, but Hatcher said she encouraged her to not forget her art. “I always tell kids if they don’t want to do art now, they will later,” she said. “It’s a good lifelong skill to have.”

Quentin Swett, a senior, has been drawing for years and is largely self-taught, but he submitted a Greek vase to the art competition. “I started pottery my sophomore year and took a year off and got back to it my senior year,” he said. “My teacher just gave me free reign to do what I wanted. It opened up my imagination.”

The vase he submitted tells the Greek myth of Achilles, a warrior in the Trojan War who was invulnerable because his mother dipped him in the river Styx as an infant. But she held him by his heel, leaving that spot vulnerable. Achilles was killed by an arrow to his heel.

Swett’s vase, which also includes a few modern art elements, depicts Achilles’ mother dipping him in the river on one side and Achilles with an arrow in his foot on the other.

“Sophomore year it was all about making things people hadn’t seen before,” he said. “It was really about me pushing my own limits to see what I could do.”

Swett is pleased with the recognition he received in the art contest, but plans to pursue a career in mechanical engineering. However, he does plan to purchase his own pottery wheel so he can keep creating. “Art, for me, is more of a hobby,” he said.

The other regional winners in the OSPI art contest are: Gillian Chappel, Ferris High School; Kyla Gurkowski, Ferris High School; Damien Baldwin, Cheney High School; Kevin Nesterov, Cheney High School; Ben Moran, Cheney High School; and Lauren Moe, Central Valley High School.