High school junior aspires to have a career in the visual arts

For Bellefonte Area High School junior Affina Garvin, art is a piece of her soul that she aims to create with personality and improve with every stroke. Her artwork is among a group of student work on display at the high school from the Art 3 class with teacher Heather Fry.

“As artists, we pour our souls into everything we do,” Garvin said. “Over the years I have really honed in on the skills, and been able to decipher what about art I like and how that translates into everything I do including how I present myself.”

Calling herself “colorful,” Garvin said she most enjoys painting, as it allows her to express movement through color, a common theme in many of her works.

“I learned that I’m drawn to certain mediums like that,” she said about painting. “I think my passion for it has bled into many other aspects of my life and I hope to continue that for the rest of my life.”

Not blinded by the reality that being an artist can come with difficulty in making a living, Garvin said she aspires to one day be a graphic designer, which she said is a realistic and sustainable career, while still being able to study the visual arts. That can all come while also still being able to draw and paint as a lifelong hobby.

On November 22, she explained a piece of her work on display that allowed her to delve into something she finds more difficult – working with shading on an investigative graphite drawing, which depicts a full-face view of herself featuring parts of her hands. An inspiration for the drawing came from the advice of a former art teacher who said, “if you master the detail of the hand, then it will be easier to do with the rest of the body.”

“I always like to incorporate hands into my art because they are both a challenge and an excellent way to translate emotion,” Garvin said.

The work, like many of her classmates, took the majority of the semester to complete.