St. Joe Artist Spotlight: Michelle Alvara
May 3, 2021
Proficient with graphite pencils, markers and a variety of paints, senior AP Art student, Michelle Alvara’s artwork presents a look into outside and inside worlds alike. Alvara takes famous celebrities as the muses of her artwork, re-working their image to communicate her own feelings and thoughts.
An AP Art student’s mission is to complete a collection of pieces over the school year that answer their sustained investigation, or SI. Pulling back the curtain on the “mask[s] people hide their true selves behind”, Alvara’s work under her SI has been unmasking the double-sidedness of our character and other mysteries of self-reflection. After inking a substantial amount of pieces that dive deeper into her SI, Alvara declares that she is most proud of “the recent art pieces that [she’s] been making, like [her] Project #8”. Titled, The Same Person, the work makes use of a colorful environment that juxtaposes stark black lines to get the subjects to pop.
Alvara imparts this sage advice upon other artists like herself, regarding the utilization of reference photos: “I know some people tend to look at images that they want to draw from the internet. I like to draw celebrities and when I do this sometimes the picture I draw doesn’t always look exactly the same to the original one. When this happens a lot of people critique their artwork in a negative way. Not every little detail has to be the same, it is okay to be original”.
