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Contact: Frank Delano is a staff writer with The Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star. Phone: 804/333-3834 
Reprinted from The Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star Tappahannock (October 11, 2003) - Boarding students of St. Margaret's School in Tappahannock last month found a refuge in art from their fears of Hurricane Isabel. Most of the riverfront school's 150 girls had been sent home the day before the Sept. 18 storm. But 17 students, most from other states and countries, huddled with a dozen faculty members on the ground floor of a dormitory as the storm raged outside. 
Photo left:
Head of School Margaret R. Broad views the hurricane art that girls created with visiting artists Konst and Konstantina Konstantinov. One picture was chosen to be the image on a commemorative t-shirt.
Many of them picked up brush, paint, pen and pencil to pass the time and take their minds off the storm. Sherelle Tate, ninth-grader from Lanham, Md., drew a portrait of a friend with hurricane-horizontal hair. Said Tate: "I didn't want to stay at school. I was really nervous, like we're all going to die. It turned out to be really boring and all we had to do was cards, games, talking to each other and art. The art made me feel better," she said. Eighth-grader Rose Patrick of Winnsboro, S.C., finger-painted a portrait of Isabel as a clown with swirling green hair. Then Rose turned her attention to the soda can, chips, popcorn, headphones and paintbrush on her table, sketched and titled it "When Hurricane Isabel Comes to St. Margaret's." Other students competed in a design contest for a T-shirt to commemorate Isabel. Gabi Price, an eighth-grader from Lexington, Ky., won with her cartoon, "Grab Your PFD--Hurricane 2003." (PFD stands for personal flotation device.) Her classmate Marissa Lambert of Gonzales, La., sat at a window for two hours with paper and pencil and sketched leaves blowing from a tree outside the building by the raging Rappahannock. Marissa then went to work on an abstract of diagonal colors. She kept at it when the power went out about 2 p.m. Artists-in-residence Ignat and Konstantina Konstantinov said they were amazed at the quantity and the quality of the students' art produced in a pottery studio hastily relabeled "Storm Art Workshop." 
"The kids kept working and turning out pictures until it was absolutely too dark to see anymore. Then we sat around a table with a lantern and talked about art until we went to bed," said Ignat Konstantinov."It was very different from normal art class," he said. "I think they were charged with the energy of the weather. It would be impossible to get those results on any other day." Students and faculty bedded down on the floors. The next morning they found the storm had washed away the school's dock and part of the bank on which the school sits. Trees were down all over the neighborhood. It took until Sept. 23 to clean up the mess, restore electric power and open the school. Students and faculty discovered another transformation. The pottery studio where they had weathered Isabel had become a gallery of hurricane art of their own creation. FRANK DELANO is a staff writer with The Free Lance-Star. Contact him at 804/333-3834, or DelanoBigtree@aol.com |
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