“Ever since I was young, I would draw people,” says Emilia Lane Malicoat Bois (known as Mimi), the young artist who created the cover painting for this year’s graduation section. “It’s so fun. Everyone is so different and engaging.”
Tasked with providing an image for this year’s issue, Bois chose to paint her friend Molly Keigans, a fellow senior at Nauset Regional High School, because she has “a beautiful and interesting face.” The two have known each other since playing soccer together in elementary school.
In her painting, Bois carefully depicts Keigans’s face amidst a cascade of blond hair, rendered with delicate brush work. Bois paints Keigans’s colorful clothing more loosely, and the blue background provides a moment of calm in this otherwise dense painting.
Although Bois has always been drawing, painting “is new for me,” she says. She recently finished a painting class at Nauset with Amy Kandall, who gave her some gouache paints that she used for her portrait.
“I like it better than watercolor,” says Bois. “You can get more solid color and lines.”
Bois will be taking a gap year before college and hopes to study art and environmental science. “I just love it,” she says of making art. In addition, she hopes to continue a family tradition of living a creative life. “I feel inspired by my grandparents and relatives,” she says. “The artist life seems truthful, expressive, and more meaningful to me.”
Bois traces her heritage as a Provincetown artist back to her great-grandfather, Philip Malicoat, who moved to Provincetown after studying with Charles Hawthorne. The Provincetown Art Association and Museum and the Schoolhouse Gallery are both presenting exhibitions of his work this month.
Although Bois never knew her great-grandfather, she has fond memories of her late grandparents, Anne Lord and Conrad Malicoat, also artists, who met at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture before settling in Provincetown. Their former home, “up the hill” from Bois’s Provincetown home, “is like its own little gallery” where Bois recently found inspiration in some small brick sculptures by her grandfather, whom she describes as “cool, down to earth, and not interested in getting money.” She hopes to use her grandmother’s former kiln and left-over glazes to do some ceramics during her gap year after returning from working on her brother’s fishing boat in Alaska this August.
Bois’s parents, Bronwyn Malicoat and Michael Bois, noticed her interest in drawing at an early age and enrolled her in classes at Castle Hill. In addition, she was involved in gardening initiatives through Sustainable CAPE, both at the Truro Central School and the Children’s Garden at the Truro library. She hopes to travel in the coming year and possibly work on organic farms abroad through the WWOOF program.
The Outer Cape, she says, nurtured her love of art and the environment, and she hopes to eventually settle here: “I hope I get to live here when I’m older. That would be pretty cool.”
