PLATTSBURGH — Inspired by her ancestors who fought in the Battle of Plattsburgh, Molly Dumar brought to life the first place winning artwork for this year’s Jane Claffey 1814 Art Award poster contest.
“When I first heard about it (winning), I was very shocked,” Dumar, a fourth grader at Rouses Point Elementary, said.
Dumar’s artwork depicted two ships — one with an American flag, the other a British flag — fighting and firing cannons at each other on Lake Champlain with a rainbow colored sky over the horizon.
In the background, sinking ships in the water and trees on the shoreline can also be seen, which Dumar said was the most difficult part to portray.
“I had a really hard time trying not to look like the boats are going into the trees, so I had to make the trees light,” she said.
BUTTON, POSTER DESIGN
Dumar’s winning poster is now the design for this year’s Battle of Plattsburgh Commemoration button and t-shirts. The commemoration kicks off Wednesday, Sept. 11 and concludes Sunday, Sept. 15.
“She spent quite a long time doing research,” Margaret Dumar, Molly’s mother, said about her daughter’s artwork.
“You know ‘let’s get out the history books and take a look.’”
Additionally, fourth grader Scarlett Gottschall of Seton Catholic Elementary took second place in the contest; fourth grader John Higgins, also of Seton Catholic Elementary, took third place; and fourth grader Stellina Minardi of Oak Street Elementary took fourth place.
All of the award winners were announced at a press conference on the Battle of Plattsburgh in City Hall Wednesday.
CHOOSING AWARDEES
The contest, originally started in 1998 by Claffey, a retired teacher who passed away last year, was open to students in schools from Clinton and Essex Counties and the award winners were announced Wednesday at a City Hall press conference for the Battle of Plattsburgh.
Shannon Piche-Smith, an art teacher at Beekmantown High School and New York State Art Teachers Association region 5 chair who spearheads the contest with Linda Ward, said there were over 200 contributing artists in total.
Piche-Smith said the adjudication process is fair in how it’s conducted.
“Linda delivers the resources and the teachers essentially send me all of the artwork, and then I take all of the artwork and I put it in a digital format. I remove all names, all reference information; there is no way that anybody would know who created a piece of artwork except for me, but I do not participate in the adjudication process,” she said.
“So I send this out to my adjudicators, which is a panel of art teachers and volunteers. They use a rubric. The rubric has craftsmanship, historical accuracy and creativity, and essentially what they do is they rank them and then send me their top … and then I add up all the tallies … It is a very fair process. It is a very long process. It takes an insane amount of time to get it all together.”