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Christin Ripley's sketchbook is filled with teenage thoughts and surprisingly profound themes. And when she paints, the art world takes notice.
By JEANNE MALMGREN
© St. Petersburg Times, published February 4, 2001
ST. PETERSBURG -- Christin Ripley wishes you wouldn't read this story.
It's embarrassing being in the spotlight, she says, her navy blue eyes blinking behind small, stylish bifocals.
"My school is full of kids like me," the high school senior says, wearing a polite, I-wish-we-weren't-having-this-conversation smile. "I don't feel like I'm any better than any of them. Some of them are really passionate about art."
Ripley, 18, and her classmates are in an advanced placement studio art class at the Pinellas County Center for the Arts, a magnet program at Gibbs High School that also includes music, theatre and dance. Since sixth grade, Ripley has been honing her talent in special art classes.
"It's something I love doing," she says.
A couple of years ago she started collecting awards. Two of her works were exhibited in juried student shows at the Salvador Dali Museum. She won several prizes in the Festival of States student art competition.
Last fall, Ripley entered a competition sponsored by the College Board, which develops college-level classes in a variety of subjects for outstanding high school students. She submitted a page torn from her spiral-bound drawing pad, an acrylic painting of her 13-year-old brother, Zachary.
"He was sleeping," she confides. "I snuck in his room and sat on the floor and drew his portrait."
More than 400,000 pieces of art were submitted by art students at high schools around the world. Ripley's was one of 27 chosen for the exhibit.
The winning artworks were shown in New York City and Princeton, N.J., then traveled to Chicago for a two-month exhibit during December and January at the respected Gallery 37.
"I was lucky," Ripley says. "They only chose that piece because it had (paint) drips."
A wisp of a young woman, Ripley looks like she just stepped out of a Raphael painting. Her long, champagne-colored hair is usually pulled back in a ponytail. Dark eyebrows accentuate her perfect, pale skin. Tiny stud earrings sparkle in her earlobes.
In some ways she's a normal teenager. She has stuffed animals in her bedroom and snapshots of friends tacked on the wall, Gibbs Gladiator shoelaces in her beat-up sneakers, a calendar on her door that ticks off the days remaining in the school year. Her favorite expression is the Austin Powers-inspired, "Yeah, baby!"
Ripley is active in the Young Life group at her church, First United Methodist. She swims breaststroke on the Gibbs swim team. This year, she was inducted into the National Honor Society. In this, her last semester of high school, she's taking the usual senior stuff: economics, AP English, AP art history, acting.
But the girlish exterior conceals what clearly is an artist's soul. Her self-portrait, painted last year, shows a pensive young woman casting a somber, sideways glance that is part suspicion, part longing.
The thoughts scribbled in her sketchbook hint at her depth. "I want to be a messenger," she scrawled next to one sketch. On another page, there's a verse from Proverbs: "Anxiety weighs down the human heart, but a good word cheers it up."
The sketchbook is Ripley's conscience, her inspiration, her private venting ground.
"This is how I solve problems," she says, leafing through the black, leather-bound book that smells of oil crayons. "I always carry it with me. It's a great place where I can practice observation."
A quotation from painter Jackson Pollock talks about using art to express feelings.
"Instead of illustrating an emotion, you can express it by making marks. That's what Pollock did," Ripley says. "And that's what I do sometimes. I go out and ride my bike to the park, some pretty place, then I make marks on paper to express how it feels."
For several years, to her parents' chagrin, Ripley found inspiration in a nude figure drawing class at the Arts Center in downtown St. Petersburg. Usually she was the only teenager in the room, sketching a live model alongside adult artists.
"That was difficult for her dad, her seeing a naked man," says Cindy Ripley, Christin's mother. She is a baker at the Kopper Kitchen restaurant; her husband, Steve, is a financial adviser at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter.
Every budding artist has a list of painters she admires. Ripley's list is diverse: pop graphic designer Keith Haring, turn-of-the-century illustrator Toulouse-Lautrec, post-impressionist van Gogh.
Art doesn't have to be stuffy, Ripley believes. She admires the installations of Christo, famous for wrapping pink fabric around islands in Miami's Biscayne Bay.
"That's art people can relate to. Everyone can see it," Ripley says. "And that's what I want to do. I want to reach more people than if my work just hung in a gallery."
Ripley used to paint in her room at home, but her worry-wart mother insisted she move to a larger space.
"What artist was it who went mad from the oil (paint) fumes?" Cindy Ripley asks anxiously.
Now the young painter works in a screened Florida room at the back of her family's house in Coquina Key. The light is poor, especially at night, but there is plenty of room to spread out her equipment: two easels, bins stuffed with tubes of oil and acrylic pigments, stacks of foam picnic plates covered with daubs of paint, which she uses as inexpensive, disposable pallettes.
Students in the AP visual art program at Gibbs choose a theme for their artwork each year. When she was a junior, Ripley concentrated on landscapes. This year she chose a more complex subject: religion and faith. A page in her sketchbook shows a rough drawing of creatures with sheep bodies and human heads being led by ropes held by three clerics, one Jewish, one Catholic and one Muslim.
"I've been raised believing this (religion)," Ripley says. "And now I'm at this age where I'm questioning things and doubting them."
Recently she completed a large canvas of a person in a high chair being spoon fed against her will. A loaf of bread and glass of wine -- symbols of Communion -- are on a table nearby.
"Ideas just flow out of her," says Alan Johnson, Ripley's AP art teacher. "And there's a real authority to the way she makes her marks. When she approaches a piece -- even if it's a large-scale project -- she does it with real confidence."
Last week, Ripley was in the Gibbs art studio working on a large piece for her one-woman senior show, in April. It's a painting of two massive trees, the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life, each looming over a pair of workable doors, which open to reveal the fruit of the tree.
"The idea is to make the viewer choose one of the doors," Ripley explained.
Involving her viewers is important to her. Recently, while a visitor was admiring one of her works -- a sculpture of a female foot crammed into a high-heeled shoe, with huge nails driven into it -- Cindy Ripley started to explain the idea behind it.
"Mama!" scolded the young artist. "Part of art is letting people find their own meaning in it."
As her senior year winds down, Ripley is obsessing about college. Her parents took her to visit several art schools: the Art Institute of Chicago, the Rhode Island School of Design and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art.
Even though she hasn't yet visited it, Ripley favors the Cooper Union School of Art, a prestigious institution in New York. Because all students receive full scholarships, competition to get in is fierce. Applicants are given one month to prepare a portfolio of works on subjects chosen by the school.
Ripley toiled several weekends to produce her portfolio. It included her human-sheep religious commentary (the school asked for a poster illustrating a social or political issue), a painting of her mother's sewing machine (a household scene illuminated by an unusual light source) and Ripley's messy bedroom (portrait of a ruin).
One of the other requirements was a self-portrait, 20 years from now. Ripley, who likes to sail, painted a pudgy, middle-aged woman swabbing the deck of a boat.
"I kind of thought about how I might live on a sailboat," she said, smiling.
Barely visible in the background, down in the cabin of the boat, is a telltale item: an easel with a partly finished painting.
Looks like the young artist expects to keep at it.