The Marblehead Festival of Arts awarded scholarships to three high school seniors who plan to pursue the arts after their graduation. This year’s recipients are Lucy Bland, Shawn Stolarz, and Genevieve Riegle.
Bland, a Marblehead High School (MHS) graduate, will be attending VCUarts in Richmond, Virginia, in September.
She has been painting since the first grade, when she started taking classes at Acorn Gallery School of Art.
Bland is the co-founder of the Marblehead Arts Association Youth Committee, where she recently hosted a solo exhibition called “Growing Up Lucy” at the Hendrick Gallery.
Since he was a kid, Stolarz has been lured to creating; art is now a daily enterprise for him, inspired, he said, by “our connection with all forms of life.”
Stolarz latest project, Portrait Study IV, is a portrait in oils he spent a year working on.
It allowed him to “see how much depth a portrait can achieve,” he said; an experimentation with different layering techniques.
For the next ten years or so, Shawn wants to continue his series of 20 paintings, crafted entirely from his imagination.
“I want to improve my understanding of the muscular system for the technical aspects before diving in,” he said, explaining his process.
Next year, he will pursue a BFA in Studio Art in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts, a program selected for its flexibility in terms of the media he will be able to experiment with.
Riegle is a filmmaker who recently graduated from Marblehead High School and who will attend the New York Pratt Institute in September.
She participated in the MHS-TV program all through high school, as well as attended the Raw Art Works Real to Reel Filmschool to cement her skills in film.
Riegle work has been recognized in the Boston International Kids Film Festival and the Roxbury Film Festival.
The Marblehead Festival of Arts has awarded these scholarships every year since 1986, with the impulse to “encourage students interested in pursuing the arts professionally to acquire a sound academic grounding in their chosen fields,” their website stated.
For Stolarz, the scholarship will help him to partially cover his education fees.
“Every bit of financial help is so good with the high costs of tuition and supplies nowadays,” he said. “I’m really appreciative.”
