Gavriella C. Levy Haskell

   There are two things which immediately come to mind when I attempt to summarize my relationship with art over the years. One is the old saying “I'm a jack of all trades, and a master of none”—I enjoy a variety of mediums. Perhaps more flattering, however, is the idea of a “renaissance woman”.

   It's pretty fortunate that I ended up playing cello. I chose the instrument before I got to middle school, merely because the orchestra director mentioned that she needed more cello players. I fell in love with the sound almost immediately, however. I love the low, rich quality to it, and its large range of emotion. I have played in the high school orchestra since my freshman year. Since tenth grade, I have also played in the senior strings group. This semester I am section leader of the cello section of the senior strings group. Though I enjoy the orchestra, the senior strings group in particular makes a wonderful opportunity to try more complicated materials.

   I came to vocal music in a similarly arbitrary manner. When I was signing up for classes before my freshman year, a friend of mine encouraged me to join a women’s choir which met in the mornings before school. Though I had little previous experience, I chose to sign up, and have sung in the choir ever since.

   It seems as though most of my artistic pursuits began merely at chance. Theater, my dearest artistic passion, is no exception. One of my dear friends insisted that I audition for the fall play of my sixth grade year. In love with the community of actors, and the transience and cooperative nature of the art form, I never turned back. I have participated in six shows during my freshman, sophomore, and junior year of high school, and took a four week long acting class from Ari Laura Kreith during a program at Barnard this past summer. This year I look forward to directing a student-written one act play; I am excited to be able to work directly with the author and the actors to fulfill the concept of the show, and to have creative license to interpret that concept.

   In my sophomore year I took a ceramics class, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I was surprised by how stress-relieving it was, even to someone like me with an aversion to mud. I did a small amount of free-handed clay sculpture before moving on to a number of thrown pieces. I also was permitted to work with a number of glazes, my favorite being the volatile but beautiful tenmoku.

   Though I now enjoy the way film allows one to produce a truly finished product—in a way most art forms do not—I came to it fairly incidentally. The student film club at my high school hosts a student film festival each year, and in the first year my best friend and I entered, merely on a whim. We have since entered all three years, and plan to enter this year as well. Our entry in tenth grade took first place. While most of what we have done is traditional live-action interspersed with stop-motion animation, this year I have been experimenting individually with three-dimensional rendering.

   I have also been experimenting on my own with digital painting and drawing over the past four or five years; I enjoy the readily availabe and large range of color digital painting provides.

   Call it art or call it programming, I also dabble in XHTML and CSS, as you can see.

Thank you for your time! Enjoy.