The Santa Barbara Printmakers Award

Awarded to Izzy Savage

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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. Izzy submitted two pieces in different media and both were accepted into the Grandparent Portrait Show.

The first received the Santa Barbara Printmaker’s Award.  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 an amusing 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.”

Izzy’s second piece is a sculpture created in Diana Hensley’s Advanced Placement art class.  Izzy taught herself how to make a face mask using alginate, a substance that dentists use to make molds.  She practiced first on her mother and herself before pasting the substance on her godmother Beulah Strout’s face.  “She’s a really hyper energetic person and she had to be perfectly still for 30 minutes.  She’s a ball of fire and raised two boys through the depression.  She’s been like my grandmother all my life.” Izzy placed the detailed face mask on the form of a big open book and painted the entire piece with special paint that looks like bronze which she ordered online.  She entitled the piece ‘Book of Wisdom’.  “When I was a Sophomore artist Ron Robertson was my mentor in a special Arts Fund project.  He taught me all kinds of tricks for working with sculpture and assemblage.”

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