Art is a stress reliever for multi-skilled senior student

ORIGINALLY WRITTEN JANET HAMOUS
For Peabody-Burns senior art student Rachel Unruh, art is a way to leave the troubles of daily life far behind.

“Art is just my release,” she said. “It’s how I escape from all the stress.”

Art has been her creative and emotional outlet for years.

“I’ve been involved in art since I was in grade school,” she said. “I’ve taken art every single year.”

She is enjoying the freedom she has this year in her advanced class with art teacher Tiffany Acebedo.

“I still have assignments, but she lets us take a hold of the assignment and do what we want with it,” Unruh said. “You get to pick a medium that you’re most interested in. I’ve had a hard time with that because I like a lot of mediums.”

Unruh has a wide range of art interests-painting, drawing, ceramics and photography-and she won’t commit to a favorite.

“Last year I was really into pastels and colored pencils, but this year I haven’t focused on one thing,” she said. “I really like bold colors. So I’ve done several paintings.”

“Rachel does everything,” Acebedo said. “Her last couple pieces have been in the themes of stars and stripes because her boyfriend, Jay, is in the service.”

Unruh recently completed a large black-and-white portrait of Jay Gfeller who is a K-State student and member of the National Guard.

“I did it from a picture they sent home when he was at basic (training) last summer,” she said. “He saw it when it was halfway done.”

Her favorite piece is a painting/collage she created using photographs of her family.

“It’s black ink on canvas, and then I used the ink itself to mount the pictures on the canvas,” she said. “I used white paint and I wrote messages.”

The inspiration for the piece came from her teacher.

“She was telling me about a collage assignment she did when she broke up with a guy she was dating,” Unruh said. “She used the actual letters-she tore them up and painted them onto the canvas and just wrote messages and what she was feeling. That really inspired me.”

She poured her heart and soul into the piece.

“It is kind of a memento for my family,” she said. “It’s got so much personal endeavor and personal feeling in it. It’s something I’m going to hold on to for a long time.”

Unruh may have inherited her artistic eye from her father, Jim Unruh.

“My dad is a visionary, but his vision is with architecture and landscapes,” she said. “You can watch him standing out in the yard, just staring off blankly, and see him get this grin on his face and then just grab a shovel and start scooping dirt. You have no clue what he’s doing, but you know he’s got a plan somewhere in that head.

“It’s just inspiring.”

Unruh said her older sister is an excellent artist, too.

“I think that’s where I picked up a pencil and paper,” she said. “I always thought it was so neat how she could get that detail so perfect in everything.”

Acebedo said the perfectionist streak runs through Unruh’s work, too.

“She takes her time with whatever she does,” Acebedo said. “She’s very precise and particular about her work. She doesn’t rush through anything. She thinks things through.”

That precision carries over into her studies. She is senior class president and is active in National Honor Society, Business Professionals of America and the Bigs in Schools program.

During the last few weeks of her high school career, Unruh is leaving her legacy to the art department by painting one of the art tables.

“Mrs. Ace told everybody to pick a table, pick an artist, pick your favorite work by that artist and put that on a table,” she said. “I chose a scene in a harbor. It’s all greenish, and you can see either the moon or the sun in a green haze back in the distance, and there are silhouettes of boats.”

Next fall, Unruh will be going to Kansas State University to study secondary education.

“I would really like to go into art, but I don’t know if the art department’s going to be in the school for very much longer with all the educational budget cuts,” she said.

Unruh plans to focus on business and technology coursework and become a computer technology teacher. She wants to “do art on the side” in the area of computer graphics.

Unruh said art will always play an important part in her life, if not as a career then as a form of therapy and as a means to help her interpret the world in which she lives.

“I think my art is more of a personal thing than for everyone else to look at,” she said.

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