Young Min

“I love folklore, I love fairies, and I love Lord of the Rings. I want to make art that feels magical because that’s what I like, but it was also at that point where I knew that it had to have depth,” Maya Cheshire (12) said.

Maya Chesire (12) sweeps her brush from side to side, covering the canvas with bursts of browns and greens. Framed by two tall trees on either side of the painting, an Irish Bog Man stands in a hole dug in the dirt, accepting his fate of death. Elongated roots cover the lower half of the piece, emphasizing the contrast between the flourishing nature around the stagnant Bog Man. 

Maya started her high school art career during her sophomore year when she chose to take the Painting elective, her first formal art class. It served as an comprehensive, introductory course, introducing the basics of painting, such as color study, landscape and still life. Instead of bombarding Maya with strict deadlines or pressure to create an excellent piece, the course allowed her to relax while developing new painting skills. Soon enough, Painting became the best part of her day as her love for art began to grow. 

“I loved [the class] so much,” Maya said. “It was so relaxing and something that I was pretty good at, so it was a confidence booster when everything else was going poorly and a place for me to decompress.”

For her final project of this course, Maya chose to incorporate renaissance style Greek columns with her love for greenery, along with an ocean in the distance. As a novice artist, Maya avoided an urban or modern style and focused on a traditional approach instead. Although she devoted countless hours to it over the course of a month, she hoped to expand the final outcome. Maya decided to revisit it during AP 2D Art in her junior year. 

“I did not like how [my project] turned out at all,” Maya said. “I had the opportunity the next year to workshop it, change it, make edits and take the painting that I was quite disappointed by in sophomore year and make it into something that I really love.”

AP 2D Art opened another realm of art for Maya. After viewing a portfolio that incorporated a robot in the creation of graphic 2D art, an unconventional approach, Maya realized how much freedom and power to experiment she had in her own portfolio. Rather than adapting her art style and perspective to fit the norms of the class, she decided to embrace her strengths and interests in developing her portfolio’s theme: depicting Indian and British culture through folklore.

“I love folklore, I love fairies, and I love Lord of the Rings,” Maya said. “I want to make art that feels magical because that’s what I like, but it was also at that point where I knew that it had to have depth.”

Maya started to evolve past blending elements of Indian and English folklore in her senior year after realizing that she felt pressured to focus on the two cultures’ conflicts by others. Close friend Rhiannon Sikand (12) expands on Maya’s passion for art and growth as an artist. 

“Maya really cares about what it means to make art,” Rhiannon said. “She’s not someone who just does it for the class or the AP score and cares so deeply about art. This year she did something that she was really interested in and really passionate about, which was exploring women, feminism and mixed media. I’m really happy to have seen her evolve and develop her perspective on art.”

After completing her AP 2D Art portfolio, Maya ventured into 3D art. Adding another dimension opened up new ways in which she could approach her paintings, and it ultimately led to her creating her favorite piece of artwork during her senior summer. Close friend James Blenko (12) comments on Maya’s incorporation of combining different art mediums.  

“I like how she uses mixed mediums, and we also share a lot of the same art tastes,” James said. “We’ve introduced each other to a few artists that we both like, and it’s very playful and visceral.”

Initially inspired by Hozier’s “Like Real People Do,” the painting illustrated the Irish Bog Man, which stems from an Irish tradition in which people throw deceased bodies into swamps. The song itself tells the story of a romance between the Bog Man and a woman that has come to the swamp to bury something, serving as a metaphor for two people, who have trauma, meeting each other and putting aside their dark past. 

The more Maya worked on the piece, the more she found the romance unnecessary. This realization resulted in numerous changes throughout her journey with the painting, such as incorporating a 3D element into a painting for the first time. 

“Instead of having a female figure to match the original romance in the song, there is a shovel,” Maya. “I also changed the composition to have half of the painting to be underground which has the roots of the trees, and I wanted to push that even further, so I ended up drilling wires into the canvas and sculpting with epoxy to elongate the roots even more.”

With the change of composition also came the change of meaning. Rather than continuing with the same narrative as the song, Maya decided to take another perspective on the Irish tradition. 

“It is really about how certain groups of people have been left behind and have been left unfinished,” Maya said. “If you look at the Bog Man, you get the message that one person has been left in stasis while every other thing around it has continued to grow and flourish.” 

Maya further expanded on her interests by taking Honors Directed Portfolio (HDP) her senior year, a class curated to fit the individual needs of student artists at Harker. With even more freedom in this class, including the responsibility of deciding how many pieces she completed, she had the chance to explore her topics of interest on her own timeline and showcase her final portfolio to friends and family in late January. 

 “I’m in HDP now, and I’m really excited because we have an exhibition at the end of the year,” Maya said. “There are a lot of projects that I’ve worked on for most of the summer, and there are things that have been brewing and things that I’ve been wanting to explore for like a while that I’m finally gonna get to work on.”