Local artist Alegra Voelker
The following article is written by Nissa Enos for the Rahr-West Art Forward series.
Manitowoc artist Alegra Voelker, age 13, and I sit at a cozy table to review her work. She brings out three journals with painted covers and a binder that is “mostly dragons.”
We met to discuss 2-D art, but she also unfolds two squares of elaborate crochet. They are giant, fourteen inches per side, which is especially impressive since they are done in microscopic, lace-weight yarn. The color grades smoothly from dandelion yellow to vivid red-orange.
“These are for a blanket. I have 2 squares done, and I need to do ten more. It will take 6,000 yards of yarn for the whole thing, since I need to do a decorative border too.”
A tiger, one of many big cats drawn by Alegra
One journal is for practice, so she doesn’t worry about mistakes. The other contains more developed drawings. Fantasy creatures, some inspired by Japanese folk tales, maps of imaginary lands, big cats, a coat of arms complete with the Latin for “prudent as a serpent, simple as a dove,” and pictures of eyes and hands fill the pages.
Many of the dragons are surrounded by written descriptions of their traits.
Map of the fantasy land Silexaura
Here’s Alegra in her own words:
“I’ve always been interested in art. I have journals going way back. I really started getting interested when I met my friend in first or second grade. I liked her dragon drawings and I wanted to make art like that.
I’m not really connected with any other artists my age though.
I mostly educate myself through trial and error. I watch a lot of YouTubes on art and I go to classes like at the Rahr-West. There are a lot of YouTubes on art! You could probably watch it for days straight.
Cover of small art journal. Painting inspired by Bob Ross
I am self-critical of my skills. Sometimes I just look at something and know it didn’t work. It’s like, nope, you’ve gotta try again. Other times I see something that worked well and I try to improve upon that.
I do art and I think it reflects life. Not necessarily helps to understand it more, but reflects it. You can see the way you see the world. Two people could draw the same flower completely differently.
I like Van Gogh’s art. I like that you can see the brushstrokes, and the way he uses color. In that time period you didn’t really use that bright of colors.
Eye. There are many online videos teaching how to draw eyes.
As for genres, I like impressionism and surrealism. I also like hyperrealism. Even in surrealism it has to look real. There’s one person I like who does hyperrealism but they do it in a surreal way. It is as if you were looking through a rainy car windshield, so everything is all swirly, but then it is very realistic for what that would look like. You would say, “I’ve seen that through my car windshield when it’s raining!”
Something that is not my favorite is really, really abstract art where it is just two blocks of color on a canvas. I don’t really hate it, but I probably wouldn’t pay $10,000 for it. I probably wouldn’t pay $10 for it. The splatter paintings, too.
I like to read a lot. I started Harry Potter with book 4 because I found it at a rummage sale, so I read the series out of order, then I read it in order, then I re-read it, then I re-read it again and again! I am one of those people who would read all day long if I could. I’ve been up to 2 a.m. reading.
Right now I’m reading Edgar Allen Poe. I read “The Cask of Amontillado” when I was in 4th grade, but I didn’t understand his motivations since I didn’t have the vocabulary to understand those 19th Century words. Now I understand it better.
I’m also reading Emily Dickinson’s poetry, and every week for school we read the biography of a woman from history. Most of them I have never heard of. We just did Hellen Keller. She’s one of the more famous ones.
A sumi-e or Japanese ink painting of bamboo. Alegra will check out all of the library books on one topic or style, study them for a few hours, and create these pictures. In this case, she’d been studying Chinese dynasties and Japanese empires in social studies and chose to copy the art style as a school project.
My current art projects are the crochet blanket and painting furniture in my room. The two cabinets will have a day/night theme, with the same scene in day and at night. The dresser drawers will all be different. I just finished one. It is a tiger’s eyes and face looking at a dragonfly on a stick.
Probably 70-80% of my art in the journals goes unfinished. I keep most of the work, but if it is really bad I recycle it. It is fun to look back and see how you have improved over the years.
I don’t think I’d want to pursue a career in art since that would just turn it into a chore but I would want to continue to do art on the side. I picture it as a life-long activity.”
