The Clyde North Principal’s Prize for Art was awarded to Year 12 VCE Art student Charlotte Francis. The piece is titled ‘Sonder’ and is a digital still from an animation she created, exploring the theme of “Sonder”. The work as described by Charlotte:
‘My work explores the social disconnection within current modern society. Our dependence on technology ultimately weakens our connections in social and communal instances and blinds us to any events surrounding us. This painting allows me to depict this through a realistic and reflective manner. The red glow surrounding the characters is used to emphasise the alarming events that many of us shut out due to our out of touch understandings of reality. Despite the attention-grabbing colours, the character in the middle is shown ignoring these signs and continuing with his life. Conclusively, the lack of sonder (realisation that everyone is living their own life) is the focus of this piece and features our existing habits’.
To add a little story about the Principal’s prize and the Francis’ family’s connection to it. They are the only SPC family who can boast that two of their children who have won the prize. Charlotte’s older sister Amy is also a recipient of the prize and won with a portrait of Charlotte when she was about 4 years.
The Cranbourne Principal’s Prize for Art was awarded to Year 12 VCE Studio Art student Alannah Egan for her portrait titled ‘Haze’. The piece communicates the idea of Private vs Social Identity by juxtaposing that what you display to the world may not be what is going on inside. Alannah describes her work in the following way:
‘My focus for this artwork was to display how people can have different emotions without showing them physically. I illustrated a figure with a passive emotion using gouache. My intention was to define the physical aspects of the emotions that one will show on their face. I used clear acetate to outline the basic details of two more faces with more emotive facial features representing depression.This executed my theme of Private vs Social Identity by juxtaposing that what you display to the world may not be what is going on inside. These outlines were drawn in different proportions between themselves and the painting to add another element of contrast. The lines are white because it delivered more of an intangible feeling as the lines represented a feeling or emotion, than physical lines. The lines added a haze to the artwork to depict the emotion that the painting was purposefully lacking. The painting contained a neutral colour palette to display a ‘blank canvas’ or emotionless face and then placed each layer of the artwork a few centimetres apart on display.’