AUSTIN, Texas — Lake Travis High School has 22 students moving on to state finals for visual arts – the most out of any district in the area.
"It really has become sort of a stress reliever for me,” said Grace Robinson, a senior art student at the high school. “Especially with painting, it's just allowed me to kind of escape from school."
An escape, yet also a way to reflect reality. For Robinson, that means depicting dementia by painting her grandmother's legs. She wants to show another side to the disease.
“It also comes with forgetting how to take care of yourself and your well-being,” she said. "She really needs to take care of her legs, but she can never remember to."
For classmates Bonnie Kim and Ashley Buschhorn, their works reflect racism and diversity, respectively.
Kim embroidered a pizza with chopsticks as one of her submissions.
"I wanted to bring awareness that within my childhood as a Korean-American, there was a lot of racism,” she said. “There's a lot until America becomes the America I picture, as in seeing every race come together as a whole."
Buschhorn entered a photo of her mother’s hands covered in a liquid color.
"To create a piece that showed an integration of cultures,” she said. “Because you can kind of see through the colors; there's a very big contrast between them. But there's also points where they're blending together."
The three young ladies turned to art to express their thoughts and find their fit.
"I wanted to try out taking art and then just fell in love with it,” said Robinson.
And now they may win awards for their artwork. The students' art competition is next month in San Marcos. They could win scholarships for their work.