Students in Vail immersed in the arts

Vail Mountain School students art work takes center stage during their Week of the Arts

Click to Enlarge Browse Vail Daily Photos Katie Cunningham, 12, walks past student-made masks on display Wednesday at Vail Mountain School as part of their Week of the Arts program. These ceramic masks are just one facet of the original student art on display throughout the school’s halls during the week. Other works include stained-glass designs, drawings and paintings. Dominique Taylor/Vail Daily Get Arts and Entertainment Feeds

Charlie Owen
Vail, CO, Colorado
May 8, 2008

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In a classroom filled with middle-schoolers, student’s hands were covered with brown clay, smiles stretched across their faces. Working as a team, this collection of Vail Mountain School pupils and possible future artists shaped and molded their ideas from what was once a lump of clay into a mushroom fantasy land.

Cory Franklin, 15, laughs as he looks at the caricature of himself drawn by artist Ken Carpenter. Franklin could be called a victim of Carpenter’s wit, or the lucky recipient of a playful caricature portrait. Either way, he had to stand in front of the room while Carpenter drew a picture of him as fellow students laughed. “I thought it was really good, it really shows my features,” said Franklin, who was embarrassed by the experience at first, but relaxed when he saw the finished product. “It’s really cool how you can take a normal face and put it into something like this.” According to Franklin, the secret to a good caricature drawing is to exaggerate three features of your subject and minimize the amount of lines used to complete the drawing. “It’s like skiing or snowboarding, you have to put in your time. Eventually you find your style,” Carpenter said. Dominique Taylor/Vail Daily Browse Vail Daily Photos

“I thought this one was the most fun,” said eighth-grader Emily Bandoni of the ceramics class. Bandoni helped make the mushroom village. Even though she wasn’t sure how to fully describe the clay creation, she said it was based on the student’s favorite video games and fairy tales.

Another kid in the class, Craig Tietbohl, wasn’t a big fan of working with clay, but agreed that the project he helped create was at least interesting.

“It’s fun to make crazy things with your imagination,” Tietbohl said.

Eventually their clay piece will find its way to the school’s kiln to be fired and then painted.

The Boulder-based Celtic band Peace & Love & Jigs & Reels performs for students at Vail Mountain School on Wednesday during a Week of the Arts. The students jumped out of their seats and began dancing and clapping to the Irish and Scottish music the band played. “All the music was lively. The music was awesome and the people were all really happy to be playing their stuff,” said 11-year-old Andreas Landeck, who was obviously happy to not be in math class. The band’s frontwoman, Cynthia Jaffe, said that she loves performing for kids because they feel the music and experience it in a more playful manner than adults. “They’re so spontaneous and they’re so ready to let it get into their body and dance, which is what this music is about anyway,” Jaffe said. Dominique Taylor/Vail Daily Browse Vail Daily Photos

Getting their hands dirty
This ceramics class was part of Vail Mountain School’s annual Week of the Arts during which students had the chance to learn from many different professional artists working with different mediums.

Everything from music to painting and sketching was taught to students over the course of the day on Wednesday, the most important and intensive day of the week-long event for the students, according to Emily Tamberino, the school’s director of communications. Every student — grades kindergarten through 12 — could get their hands dirty in clay, their faces smudged with paint or just sit and listen to some Celtic music by the Boulder-based band Peace & Love & Jigs & Reels.

Art teacher Michelle Gurnee, left, compliments Finn Sapp, 6, on his freshly painted tile during a tile-painting workshop with artist Shelia Trowbridge. Sapp bashfully described his design as a flower with a butterfly floating around it. Dominique Taylor/Vail Daily Browse Vail Daily Photos

'A diverse program'
“Their work is on display and the whole school can see it and the time is for that and focused on that rather than on other things,” said Michelle Gurnee, an art teacher at VMS for the past 10 years.

There was a festival feel in the air of the school on Wednesday. Student art was proudly displayed in every part of the building. The atmosphere was relaxed and it was easy to see that the teachers and students were enjoying themselves as the day wore on.

Kelli Linsay, 14, makes a last-minute adjustment to one of the figures on the ceramic sculpture made collectively by her eighth-grade class during a ceramics workshop Wednesday at Vail Mountain School. A mostly middle-school-age collection of students came together to design and sculpt a mushroom village featuring figures from their favorite video games and fairy-tales. “I did a bunch of the little mushrooms because I can’t do anything else,” joked eighth-grader Emily Bandoni. Dominique Taylor/Vail Daily Browse Vail Daily Photos

Nicole von Tempske, chair of the VMS art department, is thrilled with the fact that the school celebrates the arts and encourages kids to better understand them.

“We have such a diverse program, and we have teachers that offer so many different mediums and so students have an opportunity to try different things,” she said.

High Life writer Charlie Owen can be reached at 970-748-2939 or cowen@vaildaily.com.