Bainbridge Arts & Crafts and Bainbridge Island Arts & Humanities Council have announced the winner of the 2015 Amy Award for Emerging Artists as printmaker Wes McClain.
“We are excited about Wes because he really personifies the Andersons’ intentions behind the Amy Award,” Bainbridge Arts & Crafts executive director Susan Jackson said. “He is an excellent printmaker who began showing his work at BAC when he was just in the ninth grade, and he became one of our ‘real’ artists when he was a senior. Throughout his college career at Rhode Island School of Design, he continued to participate in exhibitions at BAC.”
“On top of all his great work, he is a super guy,” she added. “We are all enormously proud of Wes and take great delight in awarding him this honor. We know he will take this success with him as he navigates his future.”
The Amy Award has been given annually since 2001 to an emerging artist from Bainbridge Island under the age of 35, whose work demonstrates “a sense of quality, creativity, exploration, and dedication.”
Managed by the Arts & Humanities Council, the award is funded by an endowment established by David and Caren Anderson in memory of their late daughter, Amy, who was deeply involved in the visual and performing arts.
McClain said that for his entire life art has been a preoccupation ever since, when in elementary school, he took an animation class with the late Wendy Jackson Hall.
“I enjoyed it so much that I continued to take her classes until I was noticeably older than the rest of the kids,” he said.
He continued to draw, paint, and animate through middle and high school. In his freshman year, he and a friend created a series of relief prints that were later displayed in BAC’s annual High School Show.
In 2010, McClain was admitted to the prestigious, extremely competitive, Rhode Island School of Design, where he studied printmaking and animation while continuing to exhibit his work at BAC and in other Pacific Northwest venues. In 2013, he was honored with a solo exhibition at BAC and also created an animated short film that was featured in the 2013 Celluloid Bainbridge Film Festival.
McClain graduated from RISD in 2014 and returned to Bainbridge to continue working on his art.
“My four years in Providence gave me a new perspective on my home in the Pacific Northwest,” he said. “With that, I’ve tried to capture my own memories and evoke this abstract sense of place.”
