Student art feature: Sarah Warner
Every Tuesday, editors for The Colby Echo gather in Bob’s basement to edit the weekly plethora of articles and columns, and fit them with photos. Invariably, Sarah Warner `21 can be found with her pen and pad, drawing for the Opinions section. Sometimes pieces come in without a photo, but all is not lost! Sarah pulls through with cartoons for the lonely photo-less opinions articles.
While she is an indispensable component of The Colby Echo, Warner is much more than her campus job. She told The Colby Echo about her humble origins as an artist.
“I was a kid who liked to draw a lot. I was always doodling on my paper. I was always making stories and comics and stuff. I think I really started taking art seriously when I was about 10, when I started going to an art school.”
Warner became more invested in art at Glenbrook South High School, where her Korean teachers’ strict, technique-based art methods helped her solidify her skills. She initially considered attending an art college but decided she wanted to do more than just art. At Colby, Warner is an English and Studio Art double-major. One of her favorite art classes was Painting with Professor Bevin Engman.
“It’s a very difficult class,” Warner explained. “You have to produce a lot of work, and you learn a lot about color and color theory, and that can be really difficult to understand. She has high expectations, but I enjoyed that.”
Warner continued with oil painting after Engman’s class. She described a personal project she is working on:
“It’s my own kind of investigation.” she explained. “I’m doing abstract paintings based on still lifes. I set up a still life and then I make a painting based off of it. It looks like the still life [but] doesn’t. It’s kind of supposed to explore the line between abstractism and realism.”
During the spring semester of 2020, Warner was enjoying studying abroad in Spain when the pandemic forced her to return home. On the way back to the United States she caught COVID-19, and had to quarantine in her room for three weeks.
“During that time I was making a lot of art and I was going crazy because I could not leave that room…,” she explained. “It helped me kind of stay sane, but I was still kind of losing my mind…. I did some commissions for some friends during that time, too.”
After recovering from the virus, Warner returned for the third time to Glenbrook South to teach summer art classes for elementary- and middle-school students. The familiarity, she explained, was comforting during the early stages of the pandemic.
“I do enjoy doing it [even though] sometimes these kids can be brats. But again it’s a very regimented school [and] it’s a lot about technique, so I think you see a lot of results with the kids. It was nice because the school actually still was able to open over the summer, obviously [with] limited capacity.”
Warner considers art to be at least her lifetime hobby, if not a career someday. Whether teaching young kids, doing commissioned paintings, designing the cover for Outside Colby, or making cartoons in The Colby Echo office, she is armed with a creative mind and skillful hands. Flip to the Opinions section and see for yourself.
~ Milo Lani-Caputo `23
