Kids’ art goes on tour

When 8-year-old Blake Meyer sat down to do his self-portrait several months ago, he figured only his teacher and classmates would see it. If he’d known, though, that it would be added to a traveling art show that has stops as far away as Russia, the Pegasus School student said he might have taken a different approach.

Although so tickled by the idea of his self-portrait making its way around the world that he clapped and laughed when asked about it, Blake said he wished his drawing was done in a less representational style.

“I would have done something abstract,” Blake said.

Before Blake and other students’ masterpieces go on the road again, local art lovers can see their work through Feb. 24 at the Huntington Beach Central Library. The second stop of the three-part tour called “Creating our World: Russian/American Children’s Art Exhibition,” which allows the students and visitors to view not only the Pegasus artwork, but also pieces from students in Iowa and Russia. The show kicked off last year in October in Iowa and will conclude at the end of May in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Blake’s friends Jessica Harris, 9, and Cameron Lydon, 9, who also have drawings in the show, agreed with him that they would have taken a different approach.

“You can do anything with abstract, but it doesn’t have to look like anything,” Jessica said. She took up oil painting and charcoal drawings a year ago and said she plans on exploring her artistic abilities in as many mediums as she can get her hands on.

Blake, Jessica and Cameron had no idea their school assignments would travel such distances. If he’d known, Cameron said he would have “turned in the final copy, not the rough draft.”

Before the student masterpieces go on the road again, local art lovers can see the work through Feb. 24 at the Huntington Beach Central Library. The second stop of the three-part tour allows the students and visitors to view not only the Pegasus artwork, but also pieces from students in Iowa and Russia. The show kicked off last year in October in Iowa and will conclude at the end of May in St. Petersburg, Russia.

“Allowing the kids to be able to communicate with each other despite a language barrier, when they’ve never met, the kids see that they have something in common even if they are from a different culture,” Pegasus art teacher Vicki Truka said.

Truka coordinated the exhibition with Professor Jean Petsch, one of Truka’s teachers when she attended the University of Northern Iowa. Petsch had been working on an “impressive student exchange program with St. Petersburg, Russia” for years, Truka said. While catching up on old times, the two women came up with the idea of combining art from students in all three areas and having the pieces travel together on a goodwill tour.

For Truka, the show has an “uninhibited quality,” a sense of honesty that as they get older, people shy away from, she said.

“Everything is still new to you when you are a kid,” Truka said.

“You can tell the ideas are very personal to them,” she said. “You can just tell that it really came from the heart.”

Of the three, Blake was the only one to make it to the show’s opening on Feb. 8 at the library. Seeing the work on any other night wouldn’t be nearly as exciting, Blake said.

“There were friends and family there, and lots of free food,” he said, though he skipped the snacks.

Truka recommends looking at the work before consulting the name tag to find what location each piece of art originated from. “You wouldn’t know it if you didn’t have name tags next to it,” she said, adding that it is simply “an honest kids’ interpretation of the world around them.”

“It all comes together,” she said. “It all looks right, like it belongs together.”