Art Spotlight

Students at North Shore Hebrew Academy High School are incredible and talented, especially in the Arts. I interviewed Evie Hakimian, a junior taking AP Art, an extremely talented artist who has created outstanding pieces. Her project is a surreal piece because the skeleton she drew still has the skin on his hands and the veins within them. The hands of the skeleton drawn are still “alive” and intact while the rest of his skin has deteriorated. Evie explains that she gained inspiration for this captivating piece while looking through a photo album of old, black and white photos. She came across a simple photo of an elderly man’s hands and was interested by how much detail was shown. The materials she used were a black board and white and black colored pencils to create her project. Evie explained how through this piece, she wanted to show how even decades after one has passed away, their wisdom and experiences are still alive and out in the world. As you can see, there is nothing left of this elderly man but his hands. She specifically chose to keep his hands intact, as a living person would have, because she believes that the scars, wrinkles and blemishes on our hands symbolize the events and experiences we have gone through in life. When a baby is born, there is barely any texture on their hands, they are smooth and flawless. As that baby grows older and older, their hands gain new textures and change completely. By the time that baby reaches his elderly years, his hands are wrinkled, which to me, symbolizes what they have gone through over the course of their life. Each wrinkle and blemish represents a memory, an important lesson learned, an obstacle that they have gone through. According to Evie, “The more we go through, the more our hands gain personality and show who we are. The main point of the project is that those experiences, symbolized on the hands, stay alive even after a person has passed away. It’s passed through generations to their children, grandchildren, and so on.” Evie tells us that this piece pushed her out of her comfort zone and she learned a lot from it. The only thing she wishes she did differently was enhance the detail of the skull. Just like all of Evie’s pieces, this skeleton took my breath away from first glance and became even more impressive after learning the meaning behind it.