Recent Cochrane High School Graduate Catherine Rankin is the recipient of a $1,500 scholarship thanks to her submission to the Calgary Stampede Western Showcase.
Recent Cochrane High School Graduate Catherine Rankin is the recipient of a $1,500 scholarship thanks to her submission to the Calgary Stampede Western Showcase.
Rankin applied for the Grade 12 Western Art Scholarship after hearing about it briefly through one of her teachers. Her preferred media for creating art is through painting.
“Then my mom helped me find all the information online and we had gone previous years into the art area at Stampede and seen all the amazing scholarship entries and that's kind of how I got the idea to do it, ” Rankin explained.
The only criteria Rankin had to follow for her submission was it had to be Western-themed.
“I painted a portrait of a chicken that looks kind of like a grad photo, ” Rankin said with a laugh.
“My uncle has chickens and I was playing with them and I just kind of got the idea to paint a fun chicken. At the time I was going through getting my grad photos and stuff like that so I decided to paint it as if a chicken had a grad photo, ” Rankin explained.
Rankin is reasonably new to the art industry, joining a program called “J-Block ” when she started at Cochrane High School a year and a half ago.
“It involved after school activities and my teacher had really neat ideas, so the more I started to do his projects, the more I got into it and the more I started trying things by myself, ” Rankin explained.
The summer following her joining the program, Rankin took a month-long course at the Alberta College of Arts and Design (ACAD) in Calgary. She was also selected to have her art featured at the ACAD High School Art Show in 2015.
Rankin has been accepted into the fine arts program at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick for the upcoming semester. This scholarship will go toward the cost of her post-secondary education.
“It's amazing that the Stampede offers this scholarship and it will really help me pursue my education, ” Rankin said.
Rankin isn't exactly sure what her career in the art industry will look like but is looking forward to trying out new art mediums while at school.
“You have to do painting and sculpting and try all these different things, so hopefully from there I'll get a better idea about what I want to do in the future. What I'd really like to do is some curation - I want to curate a few exhibits so that's my long-term goal, ” Rankin said.
