Art Connects Students to History

Post date: Apr 1, 2011 3:17:08 PM

Hello, my name is Molly Flannery. I am a junior at Fleetwood High School, I am an art student and I would like to pursue a career in history when I graduate. I have previously taken both of the Holocaust courses with Mrs. Goss and Mr. Gaston. I got involved with the film through the art department. Mr. Gaston had asked our class of juniors to create a work of art that represents either a struggle, or something that Frank went through in the difficult years of the Holocaust.

I personally decided to do something with a boxcar, because a boxcar is usually something that is used in every documentary because most survivors were transported on one. A thought that really stuck out to me was when Mr. Gaston told our art class about memories that Frank cannot seem to get out of his head. Frank was on a boxcar for a very long time so I was told, so I wanted to draw a boxcar driving away on the tracks towards Auschwitz.

I looked up images on the computer to see what I could relate it to and draw from. I found an image that really stuck, it was in a sepia sort of color tone and it really popped out to me. I took the image and drew it on watercolor paper; I used charcoal and watercolor to get the effect. The picture I drew is in black and white, I didn’t want to use the sepia color tone because the black and white seemed more erie to me. I wanted people to really reflect on my art, and maybe not understand how these people were feeling because you had to be there to feel it, but I wanted people to understand that the time in the boxcar was nothing but pure misery.

I think that the idea of the movie is great. There have been some pretty interesting documentaries on survivors that have been very moving. I think that the idea of having an entire school come together to do a movie on a subject that is very important to everyone in the world today. Being a part of the art department and being asked to create works of art to be incorporated in the movie was so awesome. The script for the movie is on the computers in the art room, I am very eager to see how it turns out. Just by reading the script and imagining what it is going to be like when we see it is so exciting.