‘Like an Asian painting on silk…’

From May 5-29, the 135-year-old Society of Illustrators building on New York’s Upper East Side was the place to go if you wanted to see “the most mature, sophisticated and well crafted art of the year that has come out of art schools” in the U.S.

Out of 6,205 submissions to the Society’s Student Scholarship Competition, only 194 were selected for display and for inclusion in its annual full color catalogue. One of the few, a glowing mixed media depiction of Los Angeles’ Chinatown, was created by a modest Cal State Northridge art student who had no idea her illustration had been entered in the prestigious competition.

Hitomi Kalemkarian ’10 (Graphic Design), part of CSUN’s Center for Visual Communications team before her graduation in May, learned late one April night from art professor Laurel Long that the distinguished jury of the Society’s Student Scholarship Competition had chosen her work. “It was unexpected,” she said quietly.

Her professor’s reaction was different. “I nearly fell out of my chair,” said Long, who was keenly aware of the Society of Illustrators’ standing in the art world, of its storied past, and of the careers that have been launched by the competition—Kadir Nelson’s and Dan Dos Santos’, for starters.

Students in Long’s Art 322A class had been asked to create illustrations of public places, communicating “the sights and sounds of the place as well as their feelings about them.”

Kalemkarian “came in with black and white ink drawings of Chinatown that were beautiful,” Long said. “They were simple, and real…I was worried that the drawings would get lost a bit in the process of creating a full color illustration. The opposite happened. Hitomi’s final illustration retained and surpassed the beauty of her original drawings.”

The young artist’s use of both high- and low-tech techniques resulted in a piece “that looks old, textured and timeless, like an Asian painting on silk,” said Long, who believed Kalemkarian’s work deserved recognition by the Society. “The scene is like a metaphor for life itself, with its path ending at the looming and mysterious temple.”

Kalemkarian’s illustration began as a series of pen and pencil sketches. “Then I scanned it and colored it digitally,” she said. “I was trying to show the mood in Chinatown, the sounds and the smells you can’t normally see through pictures.”

For more information on CSUN’s Art Department, visit www.csun.edu/art/.

— Brenda Roberts

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