Over the summer, senior Catherine Marris was assigned a summer project for her entrance into the Advanced Placement Portfolio class. Using only the prompt “Song of the Universe,” Marris was instructed to craft her own creative piece.Visual arts teacher Donna Sartanowicz said she put few restrictions on the assignment, hoping it would enable students to think more.

“It was totally open to them,” said Sartanowicz. “I was trying to exercise their conceptual thinking, so even though several people might have their worked titled as the same thing, how did they think about that? How did they come up with an idea that would be unique to them?”

When Marris heard the prompt “Song of the Universe,” thoughts of canyons immediately resonated within her.

“When I think of the universe, for some reason I think of the canyons,” said Marris. “The universe is also made up of stars, so I think of the nighttime. That started the image of the piece off for me.”

Channeling her experience as a singer, Marris visualized a man screaming into the night, with a light shining on him.

“I’ve seen a lot of paintings that I admire have aspects of fire and night in them,” said Marris, “so I wanted to do something similar to that.”

Marris started by drawing the outlines of canyons, later adding the man and incorporating the fire and the background. The design was simple at first, but it became more complex as more paint was added.

According to Marris, the most difficult part of the process was knowing when the piece was finished.

“It took a really long time. Eventually there’s just a time when you get tired of it,” said Marris. “I felt like I reached a place where I was done with it. All of the elements in the piece were matching together, even if it didn’t look like I originally thought it would.”

Matthias Muendel can be contacted at [email protected].