Senior Jared Ford is “headed to art school,” after jumping ahead from his enrollment in Art 2 as a junior to take both Advanced Placement and IP Art this year, according to art instructor Jill Langston. For his efforts he has been named La Puma’s Featured Artist of the Month.
“Jared started Campo last year and I actually had him for Art 2 last year, and then we jumped him up because he wants to go to art school and he needed to develop a portfolio,” Langston said.
Ford plans on going to San Fransisco Art Institute. “I did a couple of summer programs at different art schools,” he said. “There was a bunch of different fundamental stuff like drawing realistically from models and also just working with color and stuff like that.”
Ford said that he has always been drawn to art. “I guess I’ve just been drawing ever since I can remember, like doodling,” he said. “I like how expressive it is and the process of creating art.”
His parents have encouraged this passion. “They just support me in it and encourage me to keep doing it,” Ford explained.
Ford’s 3rd and 4th periods are both in the art room. “I have 2 periods of just art. It’s really nice in the middle of the day to just do art,” he said.
According to Ford, IP Art is “on a slower time schedule” than AP Art. “It’s not really stressful for me because I’m not in the AP where you have to do something every week. That is stressful,” he said.
“I think the AP pushed people pretty hard and he’s now an IP so that gives him a lot more time to work on his artwork. I think that’s important because students have really busy schedules these days,” said Langston.
Ford has “more of an urban style,” according to Langston. “It’s very much his own personal style based on a lot of imagery he comes up with in his head. Most students tend to work off the photographs and his is completely from his imagination, which is pretty colorful,” she explained.
“I would say it’s more like characters and faces and stuff that are more cartoon-y,” Ford said.
His favorite aspect of art has been “experimenting with different materials.” He explained, “For the cardboard ones it was like acrylic paint and charcoal and china markers, and a bunch of different stuff.”
Ford’s favorite material to work with is cardboard. “You can rip it and expose the corrugation of it. I just think that it’s interesting, like the texture,” he said.
One of Ford’s cardboard paintings, abstract and painted mostly in shades of green, is one of the featured pieces in this month’s issue of La Puma. “That one was like a project for this class [Advanced Art] and it was like you had to use white and black and one other color and it was supposed to be a non-objective painting, so no figures or anything that you could put a title on,” Ford said.
Another of his featured paintings, “the one with the four faces,” is “kind of like a series of paintings where I just made up different characters that were all feeling similar emotion so they were all kind of connected.”
Ford also expresses his artistry through graffiti, which he got into through his middle school friends. Though Ford said that graffiti is “technically” illegal, he only paints it in “tunnels underground that people don’t really care about if they get painted with graffiti.”
“I basically just write a word but I don’t really want to say the word,” Ford said. “It’s kinda for the same reason as I do art, but a little different. It’s kind of more like free expression, and it’s more public.”
