Bigfork High student wins people's choice

She chose different colored crayons to mimic her long curly hair, sawdust to look like the hard crust of a San Francisco sourdough bread bowl and white sponge to be the soft inside that holds the soup.

Halisia Hubbard pulled inspiration for her mixed media self-portrait, “Bread bowl,” from a photo of a San Francisco family vacation. In the photo she is eating from a bread bowl and standing next to her sister Mielle on Pier 49.

“She’s always thinking creatively,” said Bigfork High School’s art teacher, Sarah Taylor. “She takes these snippets of her life and takes it to make something beautiful.”

The portrait was an assignment Hubbard completed last spring, and the piece won the Hockaday Museum’s People’s Choice Award for the New Artists 2012 High School Students Art Show. The show started April 5 and runs through April 28.

Three others were also entered from Bigfork High School, Isaac Passwater, Genovieve Gibson and Jesse Venteicher. Each high school art teacher in the Flathead Valley picked four student art pieces for the exhibit.

For the last four years, Taylor has watched Hubbard bloom as an artist. Hubbard is an independent study student for Taylor this year and learned how to screen print t-shirts as part of her senior project.

Hubbard said the project was full of trial and error.

“It was a grueling process,” Hubbard said. “I’ve been really wanting to learn how to silk screen for a really long time and I used this project to force myself to learn.”

The t-shirts helped raise money for Developing Indigenous Resources (DIR), her grandfather’s non-profit currently doing work in Chandigarh, India. The non-profit focuses on education as the driver for better health and income generation.

She screen-printed an updated version of the DIR logo on the shirts and is selling them for $18 each.

In addition to the $150 the shirts brought in, Hubbard raised $577 through a week-long change contest at the elementary school. Classes collected their loose change for a week and the winners, Mrs. Lamar’s first-graders who raised $88.46, get the choice of a pizza or ice cream party. Hubbard raised funds, put together a promotional video and worked on the DIR website for her senior project.

Her mother, Kerala, said Hubbard approached the project much like she does with everything in her life, with her whole being.

“She has such high expectations,” Kerala said. “She’s a little bit inspiring, because as an adult, I look at her and think, ‘you’re never going to be able to do that,’ and then she does it.”

Hubbard has been drawing since she was old enough to hold a crayon. If she couldn’t put something on paper, exactly how it looked to her, Kerala said her daughter would get frustrated.

“There’s something in her that is like, ‘I see this in the world and I have to put this on paper,’” Kerala said. “Now when she draws, it’s exactly the shape she wants.”

Hubbard applied to several art schools and was accepted to the San Francisco Art Institute and the California College of the Arts. But the schools are expensive, between $50,000-54,000 a year, and Hubbard needs to raise money for tuition.

Hubbard has applied for three big scholarships and will apply for three more before school’s out for the summer. Kerala said that as a mother, she’s not worried about her daughter, because if Hubbard wants something badly enough, she will figure out a way to make it happen.

Even if Hubbard doesn’t make enough to go to art school this fall, there is always next fall and the ability to attend Flathead Valley Community College in the meantime. Whatever Hubbard’s future holds, it will be with art.

“She is bound and determined,” Kerala said.