Fairfax teenager wins congressional art contest
If Samuel Lopez’s painting “Boy in a Blue Mask” evokes the plight of students enduring the isolation and anxiety of the pandemic, Lopez planned it that way.
“I wanted to tell people not to be afraid of the coronavirus,” said Lopez, 17, of Fairfax, who completed the watercolor on brown paper for his art class at Terra Linda High School in San Rafael.
The painting won first place last month in the 2nd Congressional District art contest overseen by U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman. It will be displayed for a year at the U.S. Capitol with works by other district winners around the nation.
Lopez and his family will be invited to Washington for a reception.
“Congratulations to Samuel for this achievement,” said Huffman, D-San Rafael. “His resolve is beyond anything I’ve seen in my time holding this competition.”
Lopez, who will start his senior year in August at Archie Williams High School in San Anselmo, has advanced muscular dystrophy. The condition has twisted his muscles and shut off his ability to move or speak clearly.
Lopez needs help holding a pencil or paintbrush in his hands, which are curved sideways, or adjusting the position of the canvas. He works from his wheelchair.
“When he needs a different color, I show him all the paints and he tells me which one he wants,” said Jenny Gortinsky, Lopez’s full-time nurse.
Although his speech is somewhat garbled, Lopez is understood by Gortinsky and his mother Morena Lopez. He speaks Spanish and English.
“He is able to talk, but he is hard to understand,” Morena Lopez said. Her son requires 24-hour care to monitor his breathing and maintain optimum oxygen levels with a machine, she said.
Lopez attended all his classes successfully online over the past year, but he needed some help to use the iPad mini, his mother said.
When his art teacher, Katy Bernheim, read the class the Pablo Neruda poem “Ode to My Socks,” Lopez produced an evocative painting called “Shark Socks,” an image of two legs with sharks at the feet.
Bernheim also inspired “Boy in a Blue Mask.”
“His art teacher told him a lot of people were dying from the pandemic,” Morena Lopez said. “He wanted to do something to tell people not to worry.”
Lopez’s determination to continue with his artwork through the pandemic “is a remarkable example of what it means to be resilient and overcome even the most daunting obstacles,” Huffman said.
“Students from across the Second District all demonstrated a similar fortitude and exceptional artistic talent in the face of being separated from the classroom and their peers over the past year,” he said.
The congressional district includes Marin, Mendocino, Sonoma, Humboldt, Trinity and Del Norte counties. Other winners in the competition included Songe Kvinsland of Mendocino Community High School, Kate Chuidian of Windsor High School and Fiona McNiel of Academy of the Redwoods in Eureka.
The winning compositions are posted online at bit.ly/3hiEOV0.
By: Keri Brenner
Source: MarinIJ
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