The seniors are awarded the money at the Seniors Award Night and the juniors get their checks at the Mill Valley Fall Arts Festival during the Saturday evening celebration for the participating artists. The festival is set for September 15-16 from 10am to 5pm in Old Mill Park. MORE INFO.
Here are the statements of the winners:
Marley Constantine, junior:
“Art has always been a big part of my life. Ever since I was young I have loved making art and art has been central in my school experience. I went to a small art-based school growing up and have taken art at Tamalpais High all three years. My favorite materials to work with are graphite and pastel but I also really like painting with acrylics. I am currently focusing on drawing people. We have so many expressions and postures through which we can convey emotion and I think we are fascinating to draw and paint. My concentration this year is on people and I chose my materials and colors to coordinate with the personality I am trying to bring through.”
Maren Curtis, junior:
“I have been drawing since I was a very young and have a passion for drawing women. Most of my pieces are self portraits drawn with pen. I love designing clothes, so most of my girls are wearing detailed garments.”
Dean Weiler, senior:
“Many of my pieces center around gender and transitioning from female to male. The human body is a big center of focus in art, and trans bodies are a large focus for many people as well. Splicing the two together and normalizing a body out of the binary. Art has helped me throughout my whole life, with my depression and troubling family issues. I came out as transgender just before my freshman year of high school, and art has helped me work through emotions and issues I deal with. Art has helped me have a voice for things words could not convey.”
Taylor Kibrick, senior:
“I’m a student in the Tamalpais High School AP Art department and primary specialize in block print and pen-based art however I love to experiment with watercolor, acrylic, and dry point. Within my art, I focus almost exclusively on line quality, especially when it comes to my block prints. Block printing exclusively captures such an intensity that no other medium can recreate that I use to my advantage to make a final piece really pop. I do this by offering the viewer simplistic geometric shapes as a backdrop, easy to attain and experience, to contrast the usually complicated subjects. In my work I aim to not only capture the beauty of nature but to portray it’s obscure and, at times, grotesque features as well. I try to bring my understanding of nature’s allure and savagery to all my art, especially in my current concentration on birds. I do this by showing the proof of processes and allowing simple physics to take control of either paint or ink.”