Grandparent Portrait Show 5
Students on their artwork
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Yibing Zhang
For the first seven years of her life, Yibing Zhang lived with her grandparents in Weihei, China while her parents were studying in Germany. “I always knew that the plan was for me to join my parents in the United States. My grandparents taught me to speak and read and write in Mandarin and I still call them every week. I visited them after sixth grade and I’ll visit again when I graduate this year.”
Yibing’s double portrait in colored pencil in Diana Hemsley’s Dos Pueblos class, shows a finely detailed drawing of her grandmother’s face on one side. A red scarf flows and turns into petals that cross a gap to the portrait of Yibing as a little girl on the other side. “When we first came here I was crying every day. I wrote a letter to my Lao-Lao but I didn’t mail it.” That letter is written in Mandarin behind the portrait of the grandmother and again in English behind the portrait of Yibing. Her grandmother will finally receive the letter when Yibing mails her the double portrait after the exhibit.
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Izzy Savage
Izzy Savage is headed for art school. She’s a Senior at Dos Pueblos High School and doesn’t know which school she’ll go to next year, but art is her passion.
A photo of a boisterous family sitting under a skewed painting on the wall shows Izzy’s father as a baby in his mother’s lap with his siblings and grinning dad. The figures are in black and white with a grainy 50’s photographic texture. Izzy, a student in Claire d’Anthe’s photography class, has photo-shopped colored details into the photo that she found on the web. “They were images of dolls and toys and fabric, and decorations that I captured and pasted over the black and white images in the original photo.” The colored images, including a tiny photo of Izzy’s great grandmother on the book case, are all from the 50’s, so they fit perfectly into the scene, but their glaring color turns the image into a funny contemporary commentary. The idea came from the style of a cartoon show Izzy remembers seeing as a child. “I never knew my grandpa and I only knew my grandmother after she had a stroke and could only say ‘yes, no, and Nuts!’ My mother has told me lots of stories about how my grandma was the perfect mother. And her senior photo looks just like me.”
.The Santa Barbara Printmakers Award recipient
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