Retrospective today for Fremd artist
A little more than a year ago, Fremd High School student Kate Vaudrey led her classmates in mounting a gallery show featuring their senior art portfolios.
The 15 artists hung their work - including Miss Vaudrey's own painting series - in a gallery space at Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, and they drew 250 people to the evening reception.
"It was a spectacular evening," says Curtis Pinley, Fremd High School art department chairman. "The students went about it very professionally."
Today, many of Miss Vaudrey's senior paintings will return to Willow Creek's South Barrington campus, this time as part of a special visitation planned in her memory, called "The Life Exhibit of Kate Vaudrey."
Miss Vaudrey passed away on Sunday, as the result of a ruptured brain aneurysm, which led her to have a fatal car accident Saturday in East Dundee. The former Algonquin resident, most recently of Inverness, was 19.
"She was a fabulous artist, but she especially loved painting," Pinley adds. "Her technique spanned watercolor and acrylic to experimental media.
"Anything she could use to create imagery, she tried."
Miss Vaudrey seemed to find her voice during her senior year at Fremd, Pinley said. She arrived at Fremd the second semester of her junior year, after attending Jacobs High School in Algonquin for her underclassmen years.
"She was looking for a school with an art department where she could feel comfortable," Pinley says.
Miss Vaudrey's contentment at Fremd led her to take three art courses her senior year, including two studio classes in which she created separate portfolios, as well as a 3-D class.
While in those classes she produced some memorable paintings including a series of children's faces from Africa, as well as a self portrait series, and another of women's bodies, painted on unstretched canvas.
"As a collection, they seem to capture her interest in people and in the human spirit," Pinley says, "both in the language of the body, and visually, looking into their eyes."
Miss Vaudrey garnered some major awards her senior year, including ones at the Harper Area High School Art Show, and at the Great Frame Up Art Show, as well as being named the art department student of the year at Fremd.
Most recently, Miss Vaudrey had completed her freshman year as a studio art major at Azusa Pacific University in Azusa, CA.
She is survived by her parents, Scott and September Vaudrey of Inverness; and siblings, Matthew Scott (Andrea Gerali) Vaudrey of Azusa, Bethany Paige, Samuel Robert and September Michelle Vaudrey.
The Life Exhibit of Kate Vaudrey will be held from 5-8 p.m. today, before a 10 a.m. funeral service on Saturday, both at Willow Creek Community Church, 67 E. Algonquin Road in South Barrington.