From bedroom canvas to award-winning exhibit, St Augustine’s graduate Laura Graetz’s art journey is nothing short of picture perfect.
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Jemma Jones
As the class of 2024 prepares for life after school, one talented graduate is celebrating her artistic triumph.
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St Augustine’s 2024 Year 12 student Laura Graetz clinched the prestigious top prize in the VCE Art Award across Sandhurst Diocese schools.
Her winning piece, Virtual Dreams, aimed to capture the motivation and emotional challenges faced by students today.
Her success culminated in a poignant moment at the Sacred Heart Cathedral, where she stood at the podium during the Mackillop Art Exhibition’s opening night on Friday, November 15.
There, she accepted the Year 11-12 Spiritual Art Award, along with an $800 art voucher to further her talent.
Miss Graetz has been putting pencil to paper since she can remember, and has been reaping the rewards of her talents ever since.
Remarkably, she secured the same top prize in 2023 during her Year 11 studies.
She said it felt like a dream when she found out that a simple canvas she had been working on in her bedroom was going to hang on the walls of an exhibit in Bendigo.
“There’s so many other people’s works from all these different schools … it was such a weird feeling seeing it put up on display,” Miss Graetz said.
In Year 11, Miss Graetz decided to blur the lines between her passion and her studies when she pursued art as a subject for her VCE alongside maths, physics, psychology and English.
Demonstrating remarkable versatility, she kept her options open for STEM careers, excelling in physics and maths, while simultaneously nurturing her passion for art throughout secondary school.
Laura Graetz’s original painting Virtual Dreams won the Year 11-12 Spiritual Art Award. It captures the motivation and emotional strains of a student.
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Contributed
“I’m a very academically focused person … but this was literally just my way to be like, ‘I can still do (art) … and call it my study.’”
Miss Graetz said learning art through school was like an escape from reality.
Penelope Jenner, her Year 12 art teacher, said she had not seen an artist like Miss Graetz in her 20-year teaching tenure.
“I’ve never seen anyone like Laura. Her work is phenomenal, but it’s also the amount of work that she does — it’s just phenomenal.”
She said teaching Miss Graetz was a learning experience for herself also, as she had to challenge herself to push her further with her artwork, but also learn how to be willing to mark someone’s work as perfect.
“As a teacher, you feel like there’s always something (the student) can do, but some of her work was just absolutely perfect. There wasn’t anything else you could do.
“So, I’m really proud of her.”
Looking ahead, Miss Graetz is set to embark on an exciting new challenge, pursuing her other passion: engineering.
“I’m hoping to get into engineering at RMIT because I’ve had a bit of work experience in it and liked it,” she said.
She said a big part of her decision stemmed from her love of maths and science in school, which she completed alongside her arts, but she knows art will always be there.
“I know I’ve got two wildly different options that I’ve picked from, which opens up a lot … but I know I have (art) to fall back on to,” Miss Graetz said.
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