Francesca Gray Wins Bianchi Art Scholarship
Huntington High School junior Francesca Gray is quite an artist. The talented teenager received the Renzo S. Bianchi Scholarship Award for her intriguing collage on watercolor paper piece now on display at the Heckscher Museum's annual Long Island's Best art show.
Before a crowd of about 300 art lovers who were in attendance for the show's opening reception and awards presentation, Lynette Bianchi complimented Ms. Gray's talent and work. The award recognizes the top young artists on Long Island for their "effort, dedication and talent."
Ms. Gray garnered the scholarship award for the work she titled, "French Horn with Orchids." The inspiration for the Huntington junior came from Esphyr Slobodkina's late 1940s-early 1950s oil and fabric on gessoed Masonite piece, "Doodled Up."
"Slobodkina's 'Doodled Up' inspired me by her use of abstracted forms and interlocking shapes," Ms. Gray said in her artist's statement. "Along with the abstracted image of a string instrument, the style of line and sharply cut edges reference rhythm and music. Although my work is more naturalistic in style, the theme of using shape and forms to create rhythm is the same as Slobodkina."
Long Island's Best bills itself as "the only juried exhibition on Long Island that offers high school students the opportunity to show their artwork in an art museum." Ms. Gray's artwork was among 81 pieces chosen for the show, which drew 300 entries from leading student-artists representing 48 public and private high schools.
Participating artists were asked "to make connections between artwork on view in the museum and their own experiences." Students selected a professionally created piece of art from one of six Heckscher Museum exhibitions and used it as inspiration to produce an original work of art.
Ms. Slobodkina's "Doodled Up" was featured in the Heckscher exhibition "Ripped: The Allure of Collage." Ms. Gray saw the work and created something special on her own.
"My process included hand-coloring papers in watercolor and then the pasting together of shapes to create an image of a French horn adorned with orchids," Ms. Gray said. "The softness of the water colored paper, in contrast to the sharpness of the shapes, is similar to the contrasting articulations, legato and marcato, in a musical phrase. The textures of sound and image show that a special connection co-exists between music and art."