What has it been like to be a Northwest Academy student during a worldwide pandemic? How has my generation learned, coped and changed?
We asked students to share art with us — poetry, drawings, paintings, recordings, videos, photos or even just thoughts — about how their lives during the pandemic. Here, we share their responses. Some themes are clear, like loss of both the academic and social components that inhabit a normal year. It’s a narrative of sadness, but also of creativity. During one of the most difficult years of our lives, teenagers have expanded their boundaries, abilities, imaginations to begin to fill the yawning gap the coronavirus created.
There are some joyful moments too. Some students taught themselves to play new instruments or began to cook or bake. Some reflected. Some found new ways of connecting with friends or family, or even strangers.
While this year has been a challenging one for each and every one of us, we’ve also managed to create in ways we haven’t before. Now, we have an opportunity to learn from what others have learned. I hope that this collection will inspire you to find what you’ve learned and created. – Liam Miller Castles
Chris Harris, Senior
The pandemic caused a lot of fear. For me specifically, I feared time. Locked in my room, I felt the need to min-max my day, to avoid the isolation haunting me in the lulls of the day. Zoom school only made this feeling stronger, the need to succeed in activities that have no tangible way in doing so. Things changed when I learned how to play the OST to my favorite movie as a kid. In the beginning, I would learn it compulsively, as I did with other tasks. But after getting nowhere after two weeks, the pressure to have tasks consume me faded. I began to feel it was okay to mosey on down the street of life. From that point on I would only try to learn the next few seconds of the song each day. Two months later, I stopped because I learned an extremely simple version of it. It taught me that doing what you can and not worrying about what you can’t is the best way to deal with my anxieties and fears.
Mary Wamsley, Senior
During these first couple months of quarantine, I was dying of boredom. I was looking for any activity to get me off TikTok and doing something creative. Around this time is also when I decided that I wanted to pursue fashion as a career. I told myself that since all I had was time I was going to learn how to sew and see if this was something that I really wanted to commit to. I not only discovered that I love the process of designing clothes but that making them is so much harder than I thought. I would seem to get all my creative ideas at night. I would stay up so late sketching out designs and just playing around with silhouettes. My favorite clothing pieces to design were dresses. I think it’s because part of me wanted to dress up so badly, I used my deep hatred towards sweatpants to fuel a fun and elegant design. I started by taking a trip to the fabric store and picking out fabrics that caught my eye. I feel in love with this cream ruffle fabric and thin tulle fabric. The colors were identical and I felt so inspired to create a piece that played around with the sheerness of the tulle and the thick textures of the ruffles, I thought they were the perfect juxtaposition, something I love to play around with in fashion. I sketched the dress out and began to create pieces over the next couple days. It ended up coming out so much better than I expected, I set my standards so low as I have never made something to this magnitude. My favorite part about this dress is that the top part can be worn separately. This piece is now being featured in my capstone along with other pieces that I have made. I loved this whole process and it gave me a deeper appreciation for clothes and the whole design process!
Max Doulis, Senior
Like a lot of people I think, I started the pandemic with high hopes that I would learn some new skill or get really great at something. Unfortunately, for the first 11 months or so I stagnated a lot creatively and didn’t really get much of anything done. Then, about a month and a half ago, I downloaded this 3D modeling program called Blender and started fooling around with it. Most of the stuff I’ve made has been terrible, but this is the first thing I’ve made that I’m actually kind of proud of.
McCune McCornack, Senior
I think that quarantine has been bad and good. In one aspect it has fueled my creative pursuits and in another taken away all my social in-person interaction. I have discovered things that I probably wouldn’t have if we were in normal times such as the fold curve which the piece above Pink Silver has. I believe by not having as much social interaction has helped my creativity by narrowing distractions and given me a clear path of exploration. For instance, I really have been working on my spray painted pieces such as the one above and have tried to really hone in on my techniques and try to perfect it as much as possible. It’s ironic to say perfect in a time like this, trying to create perfect pieces of art in an imperfect world.
Grant Hall, Freshman
This image here depicts my time in quarantine, I would like to call it “Inadequacy of Slumber.” This image was taken at 11:23 PM, on a school night. This image is special to me because it really depicts my identity. You see, through quarantine, I am now falling asleep at around 11:30 for some reason because I can’t sleep. I have been staring at the ceiling every night trying to force myself to sleep, and melatonin knocks me out until noon so I am not taking that. On this particular night, I had been listening to the entirety of Kanye West’s album, The Life of Pablo, and I was about to fall asleep. My phone buzzed abruptly and I saw that a friend snapped me. I was going to snap them back cause I was bored and my phone just took a picture not knowing I had the flash on. My eyes that hadn’t seen light in three hours were instantly blinded and I recoiled backward like a snake slamming my head against my bed frame. I fell asleep after that.
Ruby Smith, Junior
I had this idea drawing parallels to what we would do if the world wasn’t in a pandemic. The images with circles represent what life would be like if the pandemic wasn’t around. And the irregular shapes have images of daily life in the pandemic such as zoom meetings or wearing masks. There’s lines that connect circle images and irregular shapes but they never cross.
Yasmin Godinez-Valencia, Sophomore
Over quarantine I have picked up and started many hobbies, most of them unfinished. The one hobby that I have kept up throughout quarantine is photography, something quarantine pushed me into again. I started carrying around my camera everywhere and have gone through at least 15 rolls of film in the last eight months.
Jamie Mack, Junior
I was raised by a family who loved to hike. And frankly, I never understood it. I was normally wet, hungry and cold, and trees are trees are trees. Sure, every so often I would look up and appreciate the wonder of Mount Hood or Lake Tahoe, but embarrassingly I took it for granted.
During COVID, I have slowly gone back to my roots by strapping on sturdy shoes, grabbing my water bottle and heading to the trailhead. Not only is it a great form of exercise, I started hiking with a friend as a Covid-safe way to catch up. I was very relieved to learn that I didn’t have to sit in a lawn chair, in a backyard, during December in order to have a conversation with someone other than my parents. It has also been a wonderful way for me leave the depths of my room and rekindle my appreciation for Oregon scenery.
These photos, shot on 35MM via my Cannon FTB, are from a “hike” I did in Summer 2020 in Yosemite on a road trip. I say hike loosely as it was more a linear function, heading straight up for about a mile.
Liam Miller Castles, Junior
The pandemic has presented challenges I never thought I’d face. While the physical ones are the root cause, the difficulties come from the emotional ones. I’ve spent the past year fighting that both consciously and subconsciously, trying to find ways to keep myself connected to people, and making sure I take care of myself. I’ve adopted strategies from a few friends, and invented a few of my own. When I’m having a hard time, cleaning my room is one way out. I keep track of my homework and other projects on a number of dry erase boards that are actually picture frames with a blank sheet of paper behind them. I can’t work in my room unless the blinds are open, both lights are on, I have music or a podcast playing and there’s some form of white noise. It’s specific, but for me, it’s what’s effective. The crown jewel of these strategies is a poster I created so I couldn’t ever forget the list. If all I want to do is mope around, or stare at some form of screen or don’t want to eat whatever meal, the issue is always that the answer to one of these questions is no. It always surprises me that most of the time I consult the list, I say no to five or more questions. For the short term at least, I know what’s wrong, and I know how to fix it.
Malia Billingsley, Junior
Over quarantine, I’ve started sewing cloth face masks for myself and friends and family. Something I enjoy about making these masks is that I have creative freedom to use whatever fabric or patterns I like. I’ve also made several avant garde masks. I’m glad that quarantine has given me the chance to explore my love for sewing.
Joey Alldrin, Freshman
This picture is of my best friend and me. This was a very powerful moment for me because that was the first time I saw her in person, due to Covid. On top of that, I felt truly apart of the NWA community, as it was my first day. I’ve never felt so excited to come to school and meet so many amazing people, and I’m truly grateful to be here.
Tatum Wolfsmith, Freshman
The name of my piece is “From This Moment On”. With all the time we had at home this year, I decided to pick up collage. I have always liked collage, but I have never had the time to pursue it until this year. Although spending most of my year indoors has been less than ideal, Covid has been a creative outlet for me. In the collage, I am in the center holding a stack of books, and there are words around me that describe how 2020 felt to me. The books I’m holding are all the books I read last year, as reading was also one of the ways that I coped with quarantine.
Asher Wolfsmith, Junior
This photo is a cross-section between the two main things that have occupied my time during Covid, photography and a job. The job came first, as quarantine gave me too much time and not enough to do. But as I was pushing carts at Fred Meyer all day, I started noticing a lot of weird stuff. Homeless men with ducks, leashes without dogs tied to trees. Photography just naturally came out of the desire to capture those moments, and share them with others. To connect with my friends over the crazy stuff I photographed, even if I couldn’t connect with them in-person.
Carlo Hamacher, Freshman
I took this picture on one of the first trips I did with an youth outdoor organization I joined (Post 58). This was taken near where the Deschutes and the Columbia join together. One more reason this picture is so important to me is because it is one of the first times since Covid began that I got to be with a group of people my age, since we where outside all the time we could be around each other and just had to wear masks and social distance.
Subeen Kim, Senior
I named this piece Eye Contact because this is something that I find difficult to do. I think the space and distance created by the fact that most everything was virtual, due to Covid, took away some of the intensity and realness of making eye contact with other people. A lot is lost without real, face to face experiences but at the same time there’s a comforting aspect of it for me. There is a virtual mask that allows for space to remain unperceived. So I attempted to create a drawing to convey the feeling and experience of trying to avoid eye contact and being watched. I used a dull color palette with colorful lines to contrast and added a lot of details (and symbolism) –– but instead of explaining the meanings behind these choices, I’d prefer to leave it up to the viewer to interpret this piece.
Shambhava Srikanth, Freshman
This piece was inspired by my experiences through the pandemic. I chose to sandwich my reliving of pre-pandemic memories between another memory I have during quarantine. Being able to immerse myself in the natural world is one of the many things that I have enjoyed doing in the time the pandemic has given me. Using a genre of descriptive prose that I enjoy, I tried to recapture the emotions surrounding the pandemic that I have felt in the past year.
As I tiptoe through murky potholes filled with rainwater, listening to the wet air that whispers to me of lightly falling rain, tiny glistening crystals clinging to my dark hair, plastering it back across my head, I forget the times I struggled up three flights of stairs with a 20-pound backpack. Forget the times I spent in classrooms staring idly out the window, waiting for the lunch hour. Forget the times, and remember them wistfully. I weave fantastical imaginations, fairy tales, adventures fit for heroes, all within the confines of the Buchanan. Remembering, I slip, and fall.
Maddox Brewer Knight, Sophomore
This picture is of a neighborhood cat named Dorothy I met this summer. Being in quarantine has trapped me in my house a lot, but the good thing is that it’s given me a lot of time to spend outside, and especially with my pets. I know lots of other kids who have fostered pets, and while I don’t have that opportunity I enjoy spending time with my own two cats and the others in my neighborhood. I think I might annoy their owners by spending so much time sitting on their steps, but that’s okay. Getting to have my cats cuddle me during Zoom classes has been fun and made long days of online school a little bit more bearable. Having time to spend outside or with family or animals has been one of the few high points of the situation, and I’ve spent so much time with them that it’s probably one of the characteristics of my past year.
Aaron Drummond, Junior
When most of the restaurants and cafés closed during the first real lockdown last March, I started to bake as a hobby. I started with making simple sourdough bread, but I got a cookbook a few months later with some pretty complicated pastry recipes, and I’ve been slowly working my way through it. Croissants are known for being particularly labor-intensive and difficult – they require a lot of careful rolling and folding to create the flaky layers – so I was surprised when I got them right on the first try. The ones pictured are pains au chocolat, plain croissant dough wrapped around sticks of dark chocolate.
Liam Thrailkill, Senior
Over the past year art has become a way to proceed and reflect on everything happening around us. This specific piece was made in response to Anti-Asian racism sparked by the pandemic and learning about the history of violence against Asian Americans going back to WWII.
Linus Hoyt, Junior
My family had to be extremely strict with our quarantine, so my social life moved pretty much entirely online starting in March 2020. Because of this, I wanted to buy a more capable computer for gaming, school and digital art, which I got more involved in. To raise money, I took art commissions over the summer – it was pretty much the only job I could get that didn’t have to be in person. The piece pictured is a dog that belongs to a family friend, and I drew it for a commission.
Oliver Spain, Freshman
During quarantine, I have been hungry. When I browse my snack options I am distracted from larger questions about my new eating habits. Why am I even hungry? Is it because I have a lack of sensory stimulation? Has the now routine glow of my monitor and clack of the hard plastic keys of my keyboard become so constant that my mind needs an escape? Is the small walk to the pantry and the light coming through the kitchen windows enough to hold back my boredom? Regardless of these thoughts I hold out hope that the sun will shine upon me once more and I will be able to hangout with the homies.
Francesca Fox-Gitomer, Junior
The pandemic created a very odd creative environment for me. Having all the time in the world isn’t always conducive to the process. I’m a ceramicist and I usually keep my art endeavors contained in a studio. That wasn’t an option so I drove to Georgie’s on NE Lombard and picked up 25 pounds of clay to bring home. It was important to support a small, local business (and they attached a tiny packet of jelly beans to the box).
The way I worked became very black and white. I wouldn’t touch my materials for three weeks, then at 10 o’clock on a Sunday morning, I’d get an idea and would forget to eat meals or stand up until I finished. I’ve had time to experiment with making glazes, recycling and cultural techniques. At this point, I’ve worked my way through about 50 pounds of clay. I don’t sit down to work on projects as often anymore, but I definitely wouldn’t be able to create as well as I do now without the events of this year.
Zadie Niedergang, Sophomore
This November we went to the beach—one of the ultimate convergences of the anthropocene and the natural world- and I was again reminded of how those two have clashed this year. Our response to the global disease pandemic that has asked the world has been oriented towards the artificial. Oregon was destroyed by fires made worse by global warming, an issue unlikely to lessen. In the middle of online schooling, we ended up with snow days due to a citywide power outage. Nature will win, eventually. But in the meantime I will sit on a beach made partially by river dams and surrounded by people.
Linnea Anderson, Junior
Film photography was my main artistic outlet throughout quarantine. I took pictures of everything and it made me feel like the year didn’t go to waste.
Miles Greenberg, Junior
I made this video to show my guitar progress over the pandemic. I started the first week of lockdown, and have been playing at least an hour every day since. I still have a long way to go, as a perfectionist I’m never quite satisfied with where I am, but I’ve enjoyed the process.
Grant Reiner, Sophomore
This year has been a bit of a blur for me and mostly unenjoyable. I think the one that has had the worst time this year is my cat. She has been very vocal about her displeasure at having to share the house during the day. Something that amused me is that I adopted a lot of the patterns of my cat. Such as sleeping all day, eating when I want and avoiding other people as much as possible. One thing I don’t think I will ever be able to replicate is her skill at waking people up when they are asleep.
Pritam Khalsa, Sophomore
I think that my Covid experience has been relatively similar to any other person: staying inside, wearing a mask, forgetting the date and finally getting vaccinated. Currently, I’m in that in-between stage where my family and I have been vaccinated but going out and seeing people is still a novel concept. I don’t want to look like someone who doesn’t care about the pandemic but I’m finally allowed to have a little bit of freedom. I’m always tempted to think about what all of the people who didn’t get here would think about this; fortunately, I only knew one of them and he would just be happy to go to Starbucks and read the paper while his coffee was still hot.
Throughout the pandemic, the cemetery by my house has been solidified as my favorite place. There are bunnies, coyotes and people. While some might consider this morbid, I think that the dead would rather have someone visit them than be alone. As a regular visitor, I have gotten to know some of the people living there. I am always fascinated with what happened to the people in the cemetery. There are some people there who lived through the Spanish flu and it’s interesting to think that they lived through what we’re living through right now, especially people who would’ve been around my age.
Hannah Hathaway, Sophomore
My art is a fun way I can play around with color and shape. During Covid, I have started experimenting with more color in my portraits. I enjoy portraits because it feels like there is someone else in the room. I think my portraits are unique because I use a lot of monochromatic color schemes. Although covid has caused a lot of negative aspects for me, I am happy I got to spend more time painting.
James Clarke, Senior
For one assignment for band class, we used this online DAW called Soundtrap to collaboratively make music with other people, and I liked the format of the website, so it inspired me to make this original piece with only sounds from Soundtrap. I’d like to say my mood of isolation spread into this song a little, but It was also fun to try something new with music.
Conor McGeady, Sophomore
I think one of the silver linings of the past year is that a lot of people have picked up new hobbies and passions. For me, I finally got a guitar and started really learning instead of just plucking on one at school. I’m really proud of the riff I came up with on this song, and I’m really happy with how it turned out, and while it’s a bit of a stretch, the pandemic did push me to get a guitar, which led to me making this song.
Ava Schaefer, Sophomore
I took this photo a few weeks before quarantine hit. As the months went by, I found myself coming back to it. This photograph represents how I’ve felt during the past year–watching the world go by from the corner of my room. I’m actually kind of amused by the fact that you can see some of my clothes in this photo because I’ve started to wear the same tee-shirts and leggings for the past year. It’s weird to go back and look at the world before Covid and reflect on all of the changes, even the little ones feel like a lot. I took photography for the first time in freshman year and I fell in love with it. I found it taking on a therapeutic role through these hard times.
Alma Annuse, Sophomore
I made this self portrait in one of my art classes without the intention of making something relating to quarantine, but looking back on it I realized that it captures this sort of distorted sense of self that I developed from being stuck at home for so long.
Nolan Hu, Sophomore
Alexis. I never thought that my friend introducing me to some random person would turn into what I have today. From the moment we started talking, we just never really stopped. We just kinda clicked. After a while I met your family, and they’ve already started treating me as one of them. I go grocery shopping with them at Costco, help them cook dinner and look after your youngest brother. I even started to learn how to roll Filipino egg rolls called lumpia with them, and I was really good at it, I promise. Not a single thing is the same as what it was before, and it’s all for the better.
Alex Skiles, Senior
In my journalism class, we all wrote letters to the New York Times for a piece they do where they publish teen responses to their editorials. I chose a piece that resonated with me about an editor’s feeling that our homes have become as sick of us as we have of them. My letter got chosen for the piece and published alongside a bunch of others across the country. Here is an extended version of the letter including the anecdotes I cut for brevity.
For me, it feels as if my house isn’t suddenly protesting my parasitic relationship with it but rather that it’s always had these rough edges. Before the pandemic I’d been too busy going from school to home to computer to sleep to notice that creaking door or that tumbleweed of dog fur. Or maybe I’d always known about these things, but in the echoing cave of my cabin fever every odd squeak and groan amplifies into a complaint. I like the look and feel of hardwood floors, but I can’t stand the creaking. What I really want is a shaggy carpet floor that can get as gross as I feel before I clean it once a year.
I didn’t get out much before the pandemic, but now that I can’t escape my house and it’s creaking, I want nothing more than to get outside. I feel like without the pandemic I’d be doing the same amount of nothing that I’m doing right now, but I want to socialize more just because that option of socializing has been taken away. I always measure my keenness to leave the house by looking at my dogs. If they’re pitiful captives then I’m dying to get outside, but if they’re enviably responsibility-free then I know I really want to be back in bed. Lately they’ve been seeming more dejected than carefree, but they do seem happier to have me around the house more, so that’s nice.
Finn Schwarz, Sophomore
Over quarantine I’ve made a lot of beats in Logic, so I chose a few I’m most proud of. Quarantine was pretty lonely for me so most of these are chill and mellow.
Ingrid Lam, Junior
These pieces are a part of my Advanced Art final project for the year. I chose to venture further into the world of printmaking, and take on lithography! Lithography originally surrounded the hydrophobic characteristic of oil to water. However in more modern times, ink, gum Arabic and lithography crayons are used on polymer plates, allowing the ink to stick to the crayon and reject the gum Arabic and water mixture. I printed crows (inspired by my crows class I took with Molly this year) onto old poetry books I had from sophomore year English (sorry, Katie!) to add a more creative effect: looking into the symbolism through the words onto the art. These pieces signify the process of lithography printmaking and the fusion of art and words.
Paloma Thrailkill, Sophomore
My brother and I went to the beach over spring break, and these are some of the pictures we took of the landscapes there.]
Kai Miller Castles, Freshman
Over the summer, I had been super interested in Minecraft Youtubers, and I came up with the idea of building my own computer so I could run Minecraft better (and just be better at the game). I put that idea on hold as soon as school started, as I didn’t have the time or the energy to think about spending a bunch of money on a fancy (although helpful) new piece of hardware. So I waited until winter break. Rookie mistake. By the time I brought it up with my parents, Christmas had already passed. By the New Year, my PC had become corporeal; no longer an idea, it became something that would happen, whether I didn’t want it anymore or not (hint: I still want it). Now, it’s become much larger. It’s where I go to school, do my homework, text with my friends and (of course) watch Youtube. It’s become a staple of my day during the pandemic; something that consistently helps with school, but also with relaxation.
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