WELLFLEET — Three vivid works by Nauset Regional High School senior Lily Cianfaglione are on display at Wellfleet Preservation Hall: a painting with gouache, a drawing done with colored pencils, and a drawing with graphite and decorative paper. “I like to experiment with different mediums,” Cianfaglione says. “I’m a painter at heart — mostly gouache — but I like to step out of my comfort zone and use anything with color.”
Cianfaglione is one of 17 students in Nauset’s honors portfolio class. The school offers an array of art classes from ceramics to woodworking, painting, drawing, and printmaking. Taught by Ryan Birchall, the year-long portfolio class is for juniors and seniors with a strong interest in pursuing art after high school.
Birchall, who lives in Orleans and has been teaching art at the school for 11 years, says the intensive class is intended to help students create and fine-tune their portfolios.
The students’ work is on view at the hall through March 30. For the show, they chose pieces that they felt best highlighted their styles. A lot of the work was the result of monthly open-ended prompts given in class, Birchall says.
Joey Smith chose a drawing on sturdy brown paper. “The paper called to me,” Smith says, “because I knew I wanted to do something with white pencil on a dark background.” His work was inspired by Noh, a form of Japanese performance art that includes intricate costumes. “I wanted to show the patterns on the dress, the fan, and the very fancy headpiece,” Smith says. His drawing is shaded impeccably, the folds of the dress falling naturally toward the ground. The piece took “a lot of erasing and trying again,” Smith says. “But it was worth it.” A senior, he hasn’t decided yet what next fall holds; students have until May to make college decisions.
Saffron Jalbert is another senior in the class. One of her pieces is a photograph: it shows a person clutching a pomegranate, the juice running into her open mouth. “I was thinking of Persephone,” Jalbert says. It has a “seductive element,” she says, “while also looking bloody and gruesome.” While the piece started as a photo, “I felt I wanted more texture in it,” Jalbert says, so she “broke out some bedazzling stuff” and some paint, highlighting certain features on the face and the edges of the work. She glued a white bead over the subject’s tooth, making it boldly three-dimensional.
Jalbert has a hat in the exhibition, too. It is is covered in images from a World War I military book, machine gun shells, and animal print patches. Next year, she’s heading to Savannah College of Art & Design’s Atlanta campus.
Senior Emily Carr plans to study art history at McGill University in Montreal next fall. She has recently gotten into linework, done in pen and ink. “I feel that paying attention to detail is a way of honoring my work,” she says. Carr is inspired by nostalgia and whimsy, she says, as well as “archetypal imagery,” where certain images are universally understood as symbols for a concept or feeling.
Carr chose works featuring animals and architecture for the show; one piece is bordered by a medieval-looking hand-drawn frame. Each drawing takes her “a few movies” to complete, she says. She often watches Disney movies while working — sometimes the film will inspire the art, she adds.
In one piece, a pair of hands parts grasses, revealing an elephant at the end of a path. “It’s about exploring, when you’re younger,” Carr says. The hands were drawn from a picture of her own. “When you get older, it’s harder to be in the moment,” she says. The piece represents the feeling of being present.
Cianfaglione hasn’t decided where she’ll be next fall. Right now, she’s present in her own work. Several of her pieces are self-portraits. “It’s the image I’m most familiar with,” she says. But one of the ceramic pieces she’s showing — “a giant head pot” — is far from an attempt at realism.
She’s been working with clay for four years, wheel-throwing and hand-building. “I started out thinking everything had to be perfect, precise, and measured,” Cianfaglione says. As she’s grown artistically, she’s begun adding hand-built components to pieces thrown on the wheel to produce something “funky and weird — but still functional,” she says.
Parked outside the hall was a decorated Funk Bus — a surprise for the March 13 opening of the show, Birchall says. Last October, students in the honors portfolio class collaborated with Funk Bus painter Justine Ives as part of a workshop at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, creating their own stencils and spray-painting the bus. Ives finished it all up over the winter.
Parker Mumford contributed reporting.
