A.P Draw, Paint, Print Senior Spotlight Interview: Averie Perce

The AP Drawing Portfolio is an intensive course, requiring students to produce art at the college level. Students compile a portfolio of 24-29 original artworks demonstrating mastery in composition, technique, and concept. Twelve of those pieces explore a common idea, called a concentration.

Since walking into Ms. Hoadley’s classroom as a freshman, Averie has been a vital part of the Visual Arts program. Her work is reflective of memories with friends as well as her tight knit relationship with family. Since exploring different mediums, she seems to be happiest when holding a 6B pencil or developing her own processes with drypoint etching and monoprinting. Tearing, layering, and piecing together papers with drawings to create works that hold much depth.

Averie, what is the central idea of your concentration?

My concentration explores the idea of how memories impact who a person is and who they become. But it is not just the experiences that make a memory worth latching onto, it’s the people you spend your time with. Family and friends can be some of the biggest influences in our lives and I am trying to convey how our memories with our loved ones shape the kind of person we become. I’m showing this on a more personal level between the relationships of my friends and my family and myself. My experiences are the focus and in each piece I try to express my personality via the stylistic aspects such as color and line work. Many have said my art has an illustrative feeling and that description fits who I am perfectly and how my loved ones make me feel. My life is a story book with quirky drawings.

How does your work demonstrate this idea?

In order to show how the people are the most important, I have kept the backgrounds mostly black and white in order to let the color of the people shine. I have also been doing two etchings per piece, one of the people and one of the background and I cut out the people and paste them onto the background so they can really pop out. For some, I have broken them up into multiple pieces that go together like a puzzle. These represent how our memories piece together who we are and how each experience we have defines us in some way.

My concentration has changed a little since the beginning of the year. At first there was a deeper psychological exploration about how experiences and people affect us and how we take a little of every experience and every person and incorporate it into who we are and who we become. There is still a sense of that but my concentration has taken on a lighter feeling because I wanted to highlight how our close relationships with those we love impact us for the greater and how important it is to surround yourself with good folks. Like my mom always says, it takes a village.