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BCHS students bring art to life
BCHS art silk screen
Bryan County art students create silk screens after studying Andy Warhol's works. - photo by Photo provided.
Ted O'Neil
Updated: Sep 22, 2016, 2:39 PM
Published: Sep 22, 2016, 2:42 PM

Students in Kim Kaiser’s art classes at Bryan County High School were inspired to create by two very different artists from two very different eras this week.

Those in Visual Arts I recreated Vincent Van Gogh’s “Church at Etten” on a hallway wall using electrical tape, while those in Drawing and Painting used Andy Warhol as inspiration to create their own silk screens.

“It was a lot of fun,” Kaiser said. “Sometimes it’s hard to get going on a Monday morning, but the students enjoyed it.”

Kaiser said that the students who worked on the Van Gogh project spent time studying the Dutch Master’s line qualities, then redrew “Church at Etten” to use as a guide for transferring the image in a larger scale on the wall.

“We used electrical tape so it wouldn’t run the pain, but unfortunately it started to peel after a day or two,” Kaiser said. “They worked hard at getting the scale and proportion right so it would look how it was supposed to.”

While the silk screening was not a reproduction of any Warhol works, students used the “father of pop art” to learn the process and the impact of color while creating their own designs.

“They used embroidery hoops with a sheer fabric to create a design, and then had a fun T-shirt to keep afterward,” Kaiser said. “Some students have had previous art classes and for some it’s their first time, so I’m trying to give them a foundation for how other artists went about their craft.”

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Later yall, its been fun
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Ted O'Neil
Updated: May 23, 2018, 6:03 PM
Published: May 23, 2018, 6:05 PM

This is among the last pieces I’ll ever write for the Bryan County News.

Friday is my last day with the paper, and come June 1 I’m headed back to my native Michigan.

I moved here in 2015 from the Great Lake State due to my wife’s job. It’s amicable, but she has since moved on to a different life in a different state, and it’s time for me to do the same.

My son Thomas, an RHHS grad as of Saturday, also is headed back to Michigan to play basketball for a small school near Ann Arbor called Concordia University. My daughter, Erin, is in law school at University of Toledo. She had already begun her college volleyball career at Lourdes University in Ohio when we moved down here and had no desire to leave the Midwest.

With both of them and the rest of my family up north, there’s no reason for me to stay here. I haven’t missed winter one bit, but I’m sure I won’t miss the sand gnats, either.

Shortly after we arrived here in 2015, I got a job in communications with a certain art school in Savannah for a few short months. It was both personally and professionally toxic and I’ll leave it at that.

In March 2016 I signed on with the Bryan County News as assistant editor and I’ve loved every minute of it. My “first” newspaper career, in the late 80s and early 90s, was great. But when I left it to work in politics and later with a free-market think tank, I never pictured myself as an ink-stained wretch again.

Like they say, never say never.

During my time here at the News, I’ve covered everything that came along. That’s one big difference between working for a weekly as opposed to a daily paper. Reporters at a daily paper have a “beat” to cover. At a weekly paper like this, you cover … life. Sports, features, government meetings, crime, fundraisers, parades, festivals, successes, failures and everything in between. Oh, and hurricanes. Two of them. I’ll take a winter blizzard over that any day.

Along the way I’ve met a lot of great people. Volunteers, business owners, pastors, students, athletes, teachers, coaches, co-workers, first responders, veterans, soldiers and yes, even some politicians.

And I learned that the same adrenalin rush from covering “breaking news” that I experienced right out of college is still just as exciting nearly 30 years later.

With as much as I’ve written about the population increase and traffic problems, at least for a few short minutes my departure means there will be one less vehicle clogging up local roads. At least until I pass three or four moving vans headed this way as I get on northbound I-95.

The hub-bub over growth here can be humorous, unintentional and ironic all at once. We often get comments on our Facebook page that go something like this: “I’ve lived here for (usually less than five years) and the growth is out of control! We need a moratorium on new construction.”

It’s like people who move into phase I of “Walden Woods” subdivision after all the trees are cleared out and then complain about trees being cut down for phase II.

Bryan County will always hold a special place in my heart and I definitely plan on visiting again someday. My hope is that my boss, Jeff Whitten (one of the best I’ve ever had), will let me continue to be part of the Pembroke Mafia Football League from afar. If the Corleone family could expand to Vegas, there’s no reason the PMFL can’t expand to Michigan.

But the main reason I want to return someday is about that traffic issue. After all, I’ll need to see it with my own eyes before I’ll believe that Highway 144 actually got widened.

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