Artists translate pieces by children for Lake Oswego Festival of the Arts

Editor's note: This story appears in the June edition of LO Monthly.

For kids, according to Anneke Schoneveld, art is more than a form of expression but a means of understanding a complex world through imagination and storytelling.

“The stories they tell are their way of trying to understand the world and evolve into the people they are going to become,” Schoneveld said.

Fellow artist Marcia Jeglum considers kids’ art to be more uninhibited and humorous than their adult counterparts.

“Their ideas are so much better than mine and are a lot funnier than I am,” she said.

Schoneveld, Jeglum, Tim Oakley and other artists are participating in one of the Lake Oswego Festival of the Arts’ featured exhibits, “Imagination Menagerie,” where they created pieces inspired by art that was produced by children and collected via the Lakewood Center for the Arts Youth Outreach Council. The festival will run from June 21-23 at George Rogers Park.

In anticipation of the festival, Jeglum, Schoneveld and Oakley discussed their pieces for the exhibit.

Jeglum, a West Linn resident and studio artist, works with papercuts and said her pieces tend to be comical. She said picking a child’s artwork to replicate was challenging, but she landed on one she found especially whimsical — a drawing of a girl riding a giraffe.

“It was lighthearted and silly and dream-like. You can’t imagine how she must have decided on that. That one won me over,” Jeglum said.

In fact, Jeglum said she followed the original piece mostly to a tee, except for artistic form. She used the papercut technique instead of crayons. Through papercutting, she drew the piece on a sturdy material and then cut the artwork out.

“I think she was a pretty good artist. She did a really cute drawing,” Jeglum said. “What I learned is a problem with me and my work is I am too nit-picky and everything has to be perfect. By following the child’s drawing, I realized I didn’t have to be that way, that I could be freer with what I was doing than I normally am. It was so much fun. I wish I could have done more than one.”

Schoneveld, a Portland resident who works in stop-motion animation and is primarily a textile artist, is basing her piece (yet-to-be completed at the time of publication) on a child’s drawing of a puppy that is also a fairy.

“I loved the idea that it was flying off to have a picnic with a friend. It spawned the idea of lights coming through it like a very elaborate night light you can hang in a kid’s room,” she said, later adding: “It felt magical and it felt playful in a way I really appreciated.”

Schoneveld’s piece will depict a fairy miniature, with wire armature and padded with cotton, hanging off of a frame that shows a forest environment enhanced with lights and embellished with paint, sticks and foliage.

“I really want to spark that feeling of what it was like as a kid to have imagination and it to feel so real to make believe and play. I want you to imagine a whole world this creature could live in and the stories behind their life and adventures. I want you to be able to imagine the whole story of the tea party they are going to and what other creatures might they be meeting up with, other creatures that might live with them, be friends with,” Schoneveld said. “I want it to feel like a peek into an entire world, a world lovely and safe and magical to live in.”

Oakley, a Portland resident and longtime graphic designer, was inspired by a drawing of a TV set placed on top of a woman’s head. Oakley decided to alter it a bit, however, creating a piece with an eye in the center surrounded by octopus tentacles. He described the artwork as multimedia.

“That one hit me out of the 10 I looked at. I wanted to do that one because I’m familiar with doing eyeballs in TV sets from my past work. Other artists said, ‘That was so you,’” Oakley said.

Oakley said the hardest part was drawing the tentacles and that the piece isn’t making a statement but is up for viewer interpretation. He hoped that the exhibit would inspire the child artists to imagine possibilities beyond their current capabilities and to take pride in their role in the exhibit.

“If it wasn’t for her art, this wouldn’t have come out,” Oakley said.