Spotlight on Artist Jennifer Turner

Welcome to The Elective’s digital art museum, dedicated to the incredible work of AP Arts students. Each week we highlight a work or series created in one of the AP Arts concentrations—AP 2-D Art and Design, 3-D Art and Design, and AP Drawing (the AP Program also offers Art History and Music Theory)—as well as a statement from the artist (and, occasionally, their teacher).

From the first cave paintings to contemporary breakthroughs in virtually reality, art, in all its forms, has been a crucial way for people to process, make sense of, comment on, and grapple with the world around them. After more than a year of life in a pandemic, AP Art students have risen to the challenge of processing and making sense of the challenges—and opportunities—that have come from this perilous time. The work they submitted in their final portfolios is explicitly of the moment. It’s often challenging and provocative, but always insightful, inspiring, and expansive.

This week we feature a drawing made by Jennifer Turner from Dillard High School in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

Here’s Jennifer’s statement on the work:

“In this specific piece, I wanted to depict my subject in a state of awe and mental wonderment with his surroundings.

“My sustained investigation revolves around the beauty in the perspective of the subconscious mind; exploring individual emotions created by our own ideas and thoughts. I purposely altered my palette to a saturation of warmer value tones, experimenting with lining/strong mark-making and gold leaf. In addition, I wanted to spark a deep connection with the subject and the viewer through my work, making them feel the same sense of admiration and wonder when they look at this piece so that they themselves can wonder and imagine what kind of landscape the subject could be looking at?”

Here’s Jennifer’s teacher Celestin Joseph on Jennifer’s work:

“Jennifer was one of the amazing Titans that I had this year who worked extremely hard on bringing together her portfolio and making an excellent show of it. During the pandemic, I don't even think she was fazed during that time. She really put in all of her effort into the work that she was creating and developed a body of work during this past school year that was absolutely amazing. I can't say that I had a whole lot to do with some of the wonderful work that she created, but she did understand what the standards were for the AP portfolio and during the course, I made sure that you know, that she wrote about her pieces as she submitted them in terms of practice, experimentation, and revision. Also with the skill-based effort that she put into each piece, no piece that was submitted into her portfolio was entered in there unless it was compositionally sound. And she was just impressive all year long, making sure that she crossed her, T’s dotted her I’s, and submitted a portfolio that was outstanding at the end of it and reflected all of the skills that we look for inside of the AP drawing portfolio.”

And here are a few other works from Jennifer’s portfolio:

Student and teacher statements are lightly edited for length and clarity.