Jessica Bentley

Sea Grape Art Gallery is pleased to announce Jessica Bentley as our scholarship winner of 2010. 

Jessica recently graduated from Charlotte High School.  Throughout her high school career, she devoted all her time to her art classes.  Her teachers, Renee Massolio and Rosalie Mack, inspired her and motivated her to be the best she could be.  Graduating from Charlotte High School, she is leaving with vast knowledge of artistic mediums, tools, and materials of all kinds.  She has developed the patience it takes to create a beautiful piece of artwork, and she is prepared for the new obstacles that await her in college. 

            While in high school, Jessica took advanced placement art with a special group of students who were dedicated to improving their artistic abilities.  This class was designed to encourage students to use their talent in art to gain a successful career.  Artistic talents tend to be overlooked and unappreciated, especially in high school.  Compared to core classes, such as math and science, art seems irrelevant to most people.  However, students in this advanced placement art class work incredibly hard and their talents should be acknowledged.  In this class, students are challenged to create a portfolio by the end of the school year.  The portfolio contains twelve breadth pieces, twelve concentration pieces, and five quality pieces.  Breadth is a quality in a portfolio which contains various types of art that do not have to relate to each other.  This category is supposed to show judges that the artist is well rounded in the arts.  The quality section is the artist’s five best pieces of work.  The concentration category is supposed to contain twelve pieces of artwork that are all somehow related to one another.  For instance, Jessica’s concentration theme was “Endings.”  Her goal was to capture scenes that all represent some type of ending, whether it was a piece of trash that was crumpled and forgotten, or a girl screaming just to end the silence.  One notable piece from her concentration category was a piece entitled “Exhaustion.”  This image portrays a boy who has passed out after the end of a long, hard day.  Another part of the advanced placement art class was to teach the students to critique each other’s projects properly.  They were shown how to evaluate a piece of artwork based on composition, value, line, etc.  By learning how to judge artwork in an open critique, they learned how to give and receive constructive criticism. After taking the class, Jessica feels prepared for a bright and competitive future in the arts. 

            Jessica was accepted to Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, FL, and will be attending there this fall.  She has dreamed of going to this college since her sophomore year in high school.  Ringling is an exceptional art school.  It is currently the number one college in the world for Digital Arts.  It also offers many other majors such as Interior Design, Illustration, Painting, and Computer Animation.  Jessica was accepted into Ringling’s prestigious Computer Animation program.  She hopes to gain the proper skills and training she needs in order to fulfill her dreams.  Her plans for the future include working for a company such as Pixar or DreamWorks as a computer animator.  These well known companies specialize in lovable, animated movies such as Toy Story, Lion King, and Shrek.  Recruiters for these companies all flock to Ringling after every school year to collect new talent and potential employees.  Jessica is looking forward to the challenge that this college is offering her, and she cannot wait to get started in the fall.