Christal Carter Creative Arts Scholarship

My work is heavily inspired by my interactions with the world around me. Throughout the entirety of my art-making processes, I take into consideration the cultural norms and perspectives that make up my perception of our society. In my earlier works, I honed in on interpreting others’ perspectives of interactions and experiences outside of myself, coming to the realization that billions of others exist, and exist within an individualistic sphere. This idea has flowed into my most recent work, maturing and shifting into how others interpret cultural norms and gender on a personalized spectrum. My work helps to interpret and digest ideas and concepts that exist outside of myself, processing perspectives that I would potentially not have otherwise considered. Spending hours on a piece allows me to sit with a concept and truly understand what it is that I’m creating. My process usually starts with a sketch: a brain dump of everything that I might want to incorporate in my work, which then becomes narrowed down and condensed into a final vision. From this point, I go to take my reference photos from which I will create my art. I then move to the creation of my pieces. More often than not, my art takes form through acrylics, a media I’ve worked with for most of my life. Because of my comfortability and experience with the medium, I’ve found that it is the most fluid way to express my ideas, while making sure to stay consistent with technique and style. Branching out from my comfortability with acrylics, my most recent portfolio has experimented with the incorporation of 3D elements. I hope that this incorporation will help to more clearly communicate my ideas, while including significant elements that add a new depth to my pieces. Through the visual arts department at my current high school, I have been given the opportunity to truly explore exhibitions and competitions that are willing to show my work. Throughout high school, I have been able to exhibit in the National Western Stockshow, alongside the Scholastic art and Writing exhibition and the City Wide Art Contest at the Denver Art Museum. Having my art hung up in spaces outside of my school has given me a new perspective by broadening my view to artists and styles that exist outside of my peers in the classroom. I hope that a continued education in the arts through a university will allow me to continue to find these new perspectives and grow further as an artist, pushing myself past my current comfort zone while exploring new media and ideas.

Since I was 4 years old, I have wanted to illustrate children’s books. I am the proud older sister of seven rambunctious younger siblings, so my life has been filled with opportunities to explore and study children. I draw my siblings, I write about my siblings, I listen to their stories and I look at their drawings. My brothers and sisters have been the inspiration for much of the subject matter in my art. Therefore, I have experience drawing and painting children as they run outside, climb trees, blow out birthday cake candles or brush their teeth before bed. As an illustrator, I could explore these familiar, household scenes on an unfamiliar level, bringing joy to the next generation of children by capturing glimpses into another child's life. Unlike many of my peers, I prefer traditional painting and drawing to modern digital art methods because I thrive on the tactility of different art media. I love the solid, concrete weightiness of an oil paintbrush against my hand. I need to feel the textured scrape and scratch of charcoal on paper. These things are lost in the flat world of digital art. As an illustrator of children’s picture books, I would be able to harness the tangible, earthy qualities of traditional art to create pictures that delight children and inspire them to create their own artwork in turn. But painting and drawing are not my only preferred media, for in recent years I discovered that I also love to write. I believe that art and stories are intimately connected, because art is itself a language and stories are themselves a form of art. Both fields require an artist who can sympathize with human emotions, experiences and desires, and discern how to effectively express those in either words or pictures. When this epiphanic moment struck me, I realized that my career goal was two-fold: I hope to both write and illustrate my own picture books. Every artist is inspired by artists from the past, and I am no exception. I have been inspired by other children’s book authors who both wrote and illustrated many of their own picture books, including David Small, Brock Cole, Maurice Sendak, and Tomie dePaola. I love the work of these brilliant artists; they understand the harmonic connections and the essential differences between words and pictures. A picture book illustrated by its author is unique, because the pictures and the words harmonize with each other. I hope to achieve this level of harmony in my own artwork and stories. I would be so blessed with the opportunity to pursue my training as an artist and learn to illustrate picture books for children. The children in my life, including my many siblings, have made my life rich with laughter and humor, and I would love to enrich the lives of the next generation of children by creating beautiful picture books.