June 20, 2018 | UHCL Staff
Just after the May 18 shooting rampage at Santa Fe High School that killed 10 and wounded 13 others, the community began looking for ways to express its shock and grief. University of Houston-Clear Lake senior art student McKenna Bailey found a way she felt she could adequately express her grief over the loss of life.
“When the shooting happened, all victims were in the art room,” Bailey said. “Those kids were artists. I wanted to find a way to connect to them as one artist to another.”
Bailey, who is working toward her Art and Design Bachelor of Fine Arts with Studio Concentration, said she decided to try to contact each lost victim’s family and offered her services as an artist. “I said, what if I painted a portrait of all the people who died?” she said. “I really love painting and art. I started on the journey of getting in contact with families. I started out by speaking to my professor, (Assistant Professor of Art) Jason Makepeace.”
“I thought it was a very honorable gesture for McKenna to use her artistic talents in this way,” Makepeace said. “What a unique way to pay respects and to remember the ones who have passed.” He added that he helped he gain access to the wood shop so that she could begin constructing her canvases for this project.
After speaking with her professor, Bailey said, she simply wrote a Facebook post asking if anyone knew the victims or their families. She made the post open to the public and it was shared many times. She began receiving responses.
“Ann Perkins was one of the substitute teachers in the art room,” Bailey said. “Her daughter saw my post and messaged me that she’d love for me to do her portrait.”
After asking for photos that best represented Perkins, and hearing some stories about her, Bailey learned that she loved nothing more than sailing and having a glass of wine with her friends. “I got a photo of her on a boat with a glass of wine, and her daughter said that if her mother could be anywhere, that’s where she’d be,” she said.
Of the 10 who died, Bailey said she’d received responses from the families of six of them. “One was a foreign exchange student and I’m looking for her host family,” she said. “Others have been pretty open on social media. There are four I haven’t yet gotten, but I hope I will hear from them.”
She began painting Perkins’ portrait and hopes to finish in about a week. “I’d like to get one out each week and ultimately, give to the families as a gift,” she said. “I would like to show them as a collection first, and let people who were affected in the community see them. I think portraits are deeply personal – much more so than photos.”
For more information about UHCL’s Art and Design B.F.A. with Studio Concentration, visit www.uhcl.edu/academics/degrees/art-design-bfa-studio-concentration.
