Park’s oil painting, “Night at the Arena,” tells a story from that summer rodeo in San Antonio.
Park, 18, a high school senior at Elgin High School in Houston who will graduate this year, has painted several Western-themed entries for the Houston Rodeo before this latest. Some of her works in past years were selected to be in the rodeo’s prestigious auction.
Her entry prior to “Night at the Arena,” when she was in 11th grade, didn’t quite make the cut to be auctioned last year. So she stepped up her game over the summer break and started hunting for the perfect subject matter to paint. She knew her senior year entry would be her last.
Cameras stowed, she and her father hit the road to find some roping cowboys.
“We found the rodeo, took hundreds of photos, and we just kind of looked through them,” Park told The Epoch Times. One shot instantly sparked her imagination. “It looks like a painting already,” she said, speaking of the picture of a cowboy whirling a lasso on horseback.
“Being quite confident in my abilities by now, I was pretty confident that the piece would do pretty well, and I was confident that I could make it into the auction.”
“It’s actually nighttime, which is also very distinct from other work in the past,” she said. “There’s a different light source.”
Having a nighttime rodeo also adds a certain flare and flavor to the scene, with the electric stadium lights and a modern cowboy culture vibe. One can almost hear the announcer echoing on loudspeakers and the smell smoke from barbecues at the concession.
Returning home to Houston, Park tweaked the photo by cropping it and boosting the saturation to give it a “contemporary” feel, she said. Then began the months-long painting process.
Her style is self-taught. She’s picked up different techniques over the years and put them together as her own. Staining the blank canvas with a thin wash of water-soluble burnt umber oil paint, she first sketches some basic lines in pencil before focusing intently on one area, painting it to completion before expanding outward to cover the entire canvas.
“I would start with the part where I want to start first,” she said. “The face of the horse is what I started off with.” But the action of the lassoing cowboy is equally arresting; meanwhile, she’s found many people enjoyed the vibrant background, which she painted out of focus to create atmospheric perspective.
Audience members seem to buzz in the distance. Rust on the stadium’s metal support posts adds texture.
Over the past 10 years, cowboy culture has made an impression on Park, who hails from Seoul, South Korea, arriving in Texas in 2012. Although her household is “very Korean,” she says, rodeos became a tradition for her family over her years of participating in the student art contest.
“I have so many boots at home, I have rodeo-wear,” she said, adding that its primarily for fairground visits.
Entering this year’s contest alongside 200,000 other students, Park successfully made the auction and, in March, was honored along with 90 fellow student artists. Her work claimed the Reserve Grand Champion Prize and fetched $200,000, of which she'll take home $19,000.
How will Park spend the cash?
“Probably for my college tuition,” she said, adding that she hopes to attend Rice University next fall and major in biology to become a pediatric dentist. However, she intends to keep painting, and wants to be as a gallerist with her own art gallery to show her artwork.
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