Chloe Stoddard: Professional Artist in Training

Chloe Stoddard, a senior at Scarsdale High School, is a rising artist with a special talent for finding the soul in her subject's eyes and using eye-popping colors to catch her viewer's attention. Although she has drawn landscapes, she prefers to capture the life inherent in humans. For Chloe, art is all about articulating certain human feelings. "I draw to make people feel a certain way, to understand a certain something. I try to capture real-life feelings and send messages of human emotion," explained Chloe. 

In order to send those messages of human emotion, Chloe draws or paints realistic images of human faces. Wielding regular pencils, drawing pencils of varying hardness, charcoal pencils, and acrylic paint, she creates the eyes of her subjects with precise accuracy. Although pencils do not allow much in the way of color, when she works with paint, she uses a multitude of vibrant colors that make her work visually jump at the viewer. One need only look at her landscape piece in order to observe how her colors create a riveting image

Chloe's art is a solitary endeavor that defines her as a person. "Being alone is a key component," revealed Chloe. "I need to be totally calm and in the zone one hundred percent. Drawing is therapeutic as well as a pleasure." She prefers to draw in the comfort of her room or in the calm of nature, where the passions of human life may only be seen in the emotions that play across her paper or canvas. Certainly, art has implications in Chloe's personal life as well as in her drawings. As Chloe said, "Drawing makes me happy and confident in my abilities as a person."

Although it was apparent that Chloe had an raw talent for art from the time she was an elementary school child, she had yet to learn the essential techniques of drawing, which were taught to her by her housekeeper Luciana Do Lago. "She gave me all those ground techniques," said Chloe. "She taught me how to shade and how to translate my mental image onto the paper. I would just watch her draw. I would pick up her little art tools, and really just study her drawing." Later, Do Lago Alvarenga, who always seemed to know what to do, would watch Chloe draw and give her pointers. "Eventually, we were two artists giving feedback to each other," explained Chloe. Chloe's early frustration due to her inability to execute the picture she envisioned in her mind diminished as she trained her eye with at least an hour per day of practice. Mirroring the way her babysitter trained her, Chloe now teaches seven or eight girls in the form of hour lessons.

Chloe's artistic career, which will surely start full-swing when she attends a college specifically for artists, has many different paths. "I have considered animation, but I think I'd be more suited for something in advertising or working for a magazine. There's a bunch of different ways I can go," said Chloe.