If you’ve passed by the 4th Floor art gallery over the past couple of months, you’ve seen anything from a giant alluring pencil drawing of “Alice in Wonderland,” to dark, abstract prints depicting deconstructed figure models, to small, detailed sketches of real screenshotted snapchats of her friends.

Every piece (12 in total), created by senior Cecilia Sheppard, follows the theme of “Portraiture,” or graphic and detailed description, especially of a person. While Sheppard’s pieces have been up since November of 2016, the show officially opened on January 5, 2017. At her exhibition’s opening, over 30 friends, teachers, and family members came together to admire Sheppard’s work accompanied by some drinks and refreshments. The exhibit will be moved to the second floor gallery in April and comes down shortly after.  

Sheppard’s passion for art started when she was much younger. Upper School Art Teacher, Deborah Cole, who helped to set up and organize her gallery, can testify to that. “I probably first had Cecilia in 4th Grade,” Cole said. “I remember she was just one of those kids who was really so eager about art and was also very talented.”

Interested in animation, and with the hopes of working at Walt Disney in her future, Sheppard took classes at the Art Institute throughout most of Middle School. Near the end of 6th Grade, she started gaining interest in fashion, learning through her own exploration and by taking fashion classes outside of school.

Then near the start of her sophomore year, Sheppard decided to create her own fashion blog with an additional focus on culture and art. This would also end up to be her Independent Study, based around “Marketing and Social Media Strategy.”

“I think of my blog as an entrepreneurship project,” Sheppard said. “How do you market, how do you write, how do you get people coming back, how do you make something that resonates with them. How to think of these concepts and meld them into how I want to connect with readers.”

Sheppard draws similar questions when it comes to fashion.  “I see fashion as a way to empower,” Sheppard said. “How does it inspire people, what draws so many people to it, and at the same time, I think it’s so individual and personal. It’s the trends versus conveying who you are.”

While she has drawn for the majority of her life, Sheppard’s style as an artist became more refined during her time at the Vitruvian Fine Arts Studio in Chicago during her 9th and 10th grade years, when she started to realize a more formal style of art. There she could take a course on anything from figure to portrait drawing, or also reserve a time slot where she could make her own art with the option of additional instruction.

Since her time at the Arts Studio, she has attended multiple art programs, including one at Oxford University in England and another at the highly-acclaimed Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), which as Sheppard said, “is basically a six week boot camp for art theory and practice.”

There she based her course around printmaking – or the activity of making pictures or designs by printing them from specially prepared plates or blocks – spending upwards of 12 hours per piece. Sheppard said, “There were weeks when I was getting close to no sleep.” At the same time, however, Sheppard said, “It was the most inspired I’ve ever been.”

Sheppard’s favorite piece at her gallery, entitled, “Etch, Sketch, Figure Flesh,” is made from a drypoint printing process from RISD in which she took her own figure model sketch and etched marks into a sheet of glass. The piece then went through an intensive drypoint process of printmaking that involved applying ink and wiping it off to get the desired effect.

Also at RISD, Sheppard made a set of 16 small sheets drawn on with pen illustrating screenshotted snapchats that she took straight from her own account, called, “24 Hrs Snapchat.” It’s to this piece that she brings attention in her exhibition’s artist statement.

“In many ways, the art any of us creates is a self portrait,” Sheppard said. “Whether it be a landscape or a still life, an abstract piece or whatever, it may meet an assignment’s constraints, but artists put themselves, their emotional state and sense of self, into what they create.”

Sheppard found this apparent in her Snapchat project. “What I liked so much about the piece was how it played with how we think of portraiture,” Sheppard said. “I most often see people as portraits on my phone, usually as a snapchat.”

Besides those two works from RISD, there are 10 other pieces that Sheppard created from her freshman through her junior year, crafted mainly outside of school and ranging from classic, black and white profiles to colorful, obscure paintings. Almost all of these pieces are in Sheppard’s personal “Art Portfolio.”

“Cecilia is a very independent worker and because she’s done so much outside of school, she’s further along than a lot of people,” Cole said. “It’s really a pleasure to work with her because she’s so focused and so open to new things. Sometimes you get the focus, but you don’t get the openness in a student, and she’s just willing to try so many things, and so it’s so much fun and she really grows because of it.”

With passions in art ranging from fashion to drawing and with experience and skill in countless different areas, from printmaking to painting and portraits, Sheppard is really an artist of all trades. Yet Sheppard still sees more potential in how she could work in the art industry in her future. Specifically, she praises artists like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons who work with three dimensional, conceptual art. Sheppard said that she would “hope to work with digital art.”

“I’ve always thought, ‘how could you make the world more beautiful?’ and I think art is the best way to do that,” Sheppard said. “And with art, basically, I want to be able to communicate with people well, which is why I’m the head of Phaedrus, that’s why I’m the Culture Critic of ‘The Weekly,’ that’s why I write my blog, and I think when you create something that resonates with someone else, then you’ve succeeded.”