Owasso High School artists win big
By Ian Busking
The Owasso High School art classes entered 21 pieces into the Oklahoma Scholastic Art and Writing Contest and nine of them ended up winning awards! The awards that were given to the students from least to greatest were: honorable mentions, silver keys and finally the gold key award. The gold key means that the art piece is going to compete against others nationally, which one student accomplished!
Photo of Alex Valouch’s artwork taken by Julie Allison
The student who won the golden key was Cierra Rizatto. She is in Mrs. Collins art class and was convinced by her to create an art piece for the Oklahoma Scholastic Art contest. It is apparent that Mrs. Collins believed in Rizzato’s work as she is moving on to compete nationally for her brilliant piece.
Rizatto’s piece took her about two hours in total to make. She did not have any plans going into making it. She just used her imagination to take her away into a place of creativity.
Rizatto further states, “I didn't come up with it, it just went that way. It turned into my own thing… I just started the painting and just kept adding more and more to it.”
Rizatto’s creativity led her to winning the only golden key as an Owasso art student. She was excited to receive the award, as she was in disbelief of winning. Rizatto rushed to tell her Grandma and she was so excited and thought it was so cool.
Another student who entered into the art competition was Alex Valouch. He thought the competition would be a good opportunity, since he won another competition last year around July. He didn’t think that he would be recognized for his great work but that was proven wrong.
It is shocking that different pieces of art can take such a different amount of time to complete. Rizatto’s piece only took two hours but Valouch’s on the other hand took him two weeks to finish. The piece Valouch did was for his fall semester final, just a little redone after the canvas would not absorb the paint that he wanted to use.
Despite that problem Valouch was glad that he had to start over so he could use a new color palette for the work and really understand what he was working on. Valouch not only paints these types of art for Mrs. Collins art class but he is going to be published outside of class.
Photo of Cierra Rizatto’s gold key piece taken by Julie Allison
Valouch says, “I’m working on the Youth Leadership Council for Amplify Tulsa, a non-profit group that works to make sex education more accurate and accessible in Oklahoma, and the project I’m apart of is creating a book of visual art and poetry around the topic of consent and healthy/unhealthy relationships.”
Valouch is definitely going to inspire many people with his artwork in the upcoming future!
Despite having different styles, approaches to their art and time spent on their pieces. Rizatto and Valouch both are incredible artists and are just a couple of examples of amazing ones that are in Owasso. Congratulations to everyone who competed and won awards in the art contest!