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WMU student receives Judges Choice Award at state fair
Ella Kahn’s saw blade pointillism project caught the eye of state fair judges
DES MOINES — Winfield-Mt. Union incoming Sophomore Ella Kahn received a judges choice award for her unique visual arts submission at the Iowa State Fair, last week.
Through over 45 hours of active painting work, Ella created an interactive visual art project on a large saw blade she found at an antique store in Clarinda.
According to Ella’s mom Emily Kahn, while Ella paints on canvas, she commonly uses unique items like this saw blade for her projects.
“Some of her best pieces, some of the other things she's entered in contests include a painted traffic cone, a stop sign, and license plates,” Emily said. “So, it's kind of fun to see something at a junk store and think, ‘I think I can turn that into a piece of art,’ which is also really cool.”
When she first found this extra-large saw blade, Ella said she had no idea what she was going to paint on it.
“I knew I wanted it to have something to do with the rotation of the saw blade,” she said. “So, I thought, I had two separate ideas to go off of at first. So, I started off with the four different seasons kind of type idea. And then I thought of the different biomes of our world and how they can like transition into each other throughout the world.”
Once she decided to pursue the biome concept, she got to sketching her idea on the Procreate app before getting into the physical work.
“I started by cleaning the saw blade because it was so rusty and dirty,” Ella said.
While cleaning may seem like one of the simpler steps to this project, Ella said it took quite a bit of elbow grease.
She then sanded the blade and applied a product to help her paint stick to the eccentric canvas. Even at this point, however, Ella was still not ready to paint.
“The next hardest part was trying to get my sketched outline on from Procreate onto the saw blade because I can't just freehand it because there's so many different details,” she explained. “So, I decided to use a grid. I drew a grid onto my drawing and then I used the right measurements, and I drew it on to the saw blade and then I free handed everything else which was really hard.”
Ella then set to work for hours upon hours covering the blade first in dark flat tones as a base, then in hundreds of dots in varying sizes to create a beautiful design that blended the desert into the mountains, into the forest, into the ocean.
“A 45-hour long project,” she said. “It's my biggest one yet, and I'm definitely most proud of it.”
Not only did Ella utilize an unconventional canvas, in the display of her labor-intensive artwork, she chose to implement an interactive feature.
“One of the other biggest, hardest things I had to think of was how the heck am I going to display this giant, heavy, two and a half feet long saw blade at that state fair and at the county fair,” she said.
Not only did she need to figure out how to display it, but Ella was certain she wanted the piece to rotate so everyone could see how the biomes blended into one another.
With the help of her dad, Ella used a metal easel, because a wood one wouldn’t support the weight, a black wooden background, and a dowel the same size as the blade hole as her display mechanism.
“That was still a little wobbly, and we were still really worried it would break at any second, but it made it through,” she said.
According to Emily, watching people reach out to touch and interact with the art was both satisfying and nerve-wracking.
“So, I think Ella got a lot of pleasure out of people picking up the concept she had, and it made sense to them too, which was really cool to see,” Emily said.
“Once it was on it and people were interacting with it, it was just so cool to watch,” Ella said. “it's a good feeling to see people love the things that you make.”
While seeing people understand and love her art was sufficient reward for her hard work, Ella was over the moon to hear that her project received one of the few judge’s choice awards.
“This year they gave out about eight of them for the whole visual arts category,” Emily said. “a lot of people do visual arts. So that's out of probably hundreds of entries.”
“So, we were very so shocked,” Ella said.
Ella was not at the State Fair when she received the award. She found out from friends and family texting her congratulations.
According to Ella, receiving this reward felt like the judges were “kind of rewarding you for all that hard work that you put in.”
“I kind of was just expecting just kind of plain ribbon,” Ella said. “I mean it was just something there. The State Fair always has such cool stuff and I'm like, ‘oh my gosh that's such a good idea’ and then I'm getting all these ideas and I never thought that mine would be something that people would think of when they got judges choice.”
Comments: AnnaMarie.Ward@southeastiowaunion.com
