Alethea Bergad is a sophomore here at Mendham High School. Alethea was first inspired to start drawing because of her mom. Her mother attended school for graphic art design at Carnegie Mellon University and she was an artist, so Alethea was driven to do the same. Coincidently, Alethea’s first medium, drawing, is also one of her favorites. Her other favorites fall under the overarching category of drawing: regular pencil, colored pencils, and pastels, as for her favorite medium, Alethea says that she enjoys doing ink art.  She has, however, branched out and tried her hand at various other mediums.

Alethea has had the opportunity to show some of her work at the Night of the Arts at West Morris Mendham High School in 2017. The artwork she showed there was mainly wood photo transfers. On the experience, Alethea says, “It was interesting to see people’s reactions as they looked at my photos.”

While Alethea does take art classes at school, outside of school she does a lot of work as well. She will often be found doodling on another piece of paper while doing her homework and she takes on larger projects at home too. “I like to get something done if I have an idea,” she explained about her outside-of-school projects.

Alethea is most proud of her red and white charcoal pencil self-portrait that she made in art class last year. Alongside doodling outside of school, in art class, Alethea is currently working on an independent project where she is drawing Icelandic horses in four different drawing mediums. So far, she has done an ink and pastel drawing, and currently, she is working with colored pencils. Next, she will be working on a charcoal one. On her art class experience in school, Alethea remarks “It’s cool because we get to learn different things, and we get to do different projects using different things.” She has taken trips outside of her comfort zone but enjoys her experiences all the same, a point she expressed while talking about her art class projects. This year, Alethea described doing an intriguing project using ball-point pens. She had to use the pens to combine an older art piece with a newer art piece in order to tell a story. Alethea has been exposed to many different materials throughout high school art classes.

When asked for her thoughts on art in general, Alethea said, “Art’s kind of an escape from the stress of school.” While she admits that sometimes, if she has a project deadline, it can be a little anxiety-inducing, as long as she practices time-management, she’ll finish on time. Alethea said that she loves to sit down, listen to some music, and just choose for herself what she wants to draw.

Photo Courtesy of Alethea Bergad.