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Fair Swirling cupcakes and nutrition science
A renaissance student earns top honors at Cultural Arts Luncheon
Part three in a series on Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District students of the arts.
Bellmorite Jamie Landau studied cupcakes while at Kennedy High School, from which the 17-year-old graduated with honors on Sunday.
Landau, who will attend the College of William & Mary in Virginia in the fall, explored the shape and texture of cupcakes. She looked for nuances in the folds and swirls of their frosted tops. She even took a job at New York Cupcakery in Bellmore, in part to familiarize herself with their every detail.
And from her studies, Landau painted a series of cupcake masterpieces in Advanced Placement art and other studio courses at Kennedy that helped earn her recognition as one of the Central High School District’s top visual artists at the recent Bellmore-Merrick Cultural Arts Luncheon.
Art, Landau said, “has always been a part of my life.” She cannot recall a time when she did not have paints and pencils in her hands or by her side.
Landau said she was inspired to paint cupcakes by Wayne Thiebaud, a 91-year-old California artist who earned the National Medal of the Arts in 1994 for a career that focused largely on painting desserts. Thiebaud gained notoriety for his clean lines and subtle details. More than that, his paintings are just plain fun.
And so are Landau’s. She said she layers on paint to create a three-dimensional effect for the frosting on her cupcakes.
As an artist, though, Landau is more than cupcakes. She loves to paint portraits –– some gentle and beautiful, others a little rough around the edges. One is simply of the lower right side of an unknown face, full of shaving cream. The mouth is partly open, as if the subject is exhaling. The stuccoed texture of the shaving cream contrasts with the finely detailed lips, conveying a sense of the frenetic pace of a teenager’s life, even though the subject is motionless.
Landau could have gone to art school, but she will not. At William & Mary, she will instead major in biology and minor in art. Her focus at Kennedy was, in fact, science.
