Student gets close look at top art school

For Tori DeLeone, this summer was never a blank canvas. The Sisters High School senior worked hard all spring to be accepted into an elite pre-college art residency program and she had a ticket for the East Coast.

DeLeone spent an intensive four weeks at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, one of the country's oldest and most respected art schools, expanding her portfolio and her ideas for the future.

It was an exhausting schedule.

Most days, classes began at 7 a.m. and ran for seven hours, breaking only for lunch. Students returned after dinner for three more hours of studio time.

DeLeone chose acrylic figure drawing and painting for her core class, so studio time meant getting past the awkwardness of working with a live model to capture the human form on canvas.

In an elective workshop, she created a multimedia sculpture of a fishbowl scene "using only books or parts of books," she explained.

The 270 students, most of whom came from private schools or art magnet schools all over the U.S., eagerly viewed gallery masterpieces and contemporary art on field trips to New York City and Washington, D.C.

Guest speakers included an FBI counterfeit art expert, and Kevin Kallaugher ("KAL"), the well-known editorial cartoonist for The Economist of London.

"That broadened my idea of art careers," she said.

All those hours focused on art gave DeLeone a valuable chance to "figure out just what I didn't want to do and allowed me to explore other options," she says.

What she doesn't want to do is allow herself to get burned out by what she loves. She's made a decision not to apply to fine art schools for next fall, but rather to seek out a broader education.

DeLeone is considering a major in anthropology - because "art is a reflection of culture" - or possibly art history. She likes English and the humanities also. One way or the other, she plans an intensive arts focus.

A whirlwind tour of Ivy League campuses with her mother followed DeLeone's time at MICA; she'll be applying to a number of schools in the coming months. Her top choices: Dartmouth in New Hampshire and Columbia University in New York City.

"Dartmouth's in a small town with similarities to Sisters - hiking, rafting, horses," she said. As for Columbia: "It'd also be cool to be in the city and exposed to that."

DeLeone returns to Sisters High School this week, where she first developed her love of painting, jewelry-making and sculpture.

And if things go as this highly focused student plans, she'll be needing another ticket to the East Coast next fall.