For some, it’s a lifelong dream to see their art hanging in a museum. For Cor Jesu junior Natalie Niemczyk, this dream became a reality when her painting “Carpy Collage” was accepted into the 2023 Young Artist Exhibition: Remix at the Saint Louis Art Museum earlier this year.

“It was a super great feeling for me,” Niemczyk said. “Nothing like that has ever happened to me before. It’s really cool, because I’ll be walking around school and teachers or people in my class will be like, ‘I saw your painting this weekend.’”

Though always interested in art growing up, Niemczyk recalled getting “really into it” when she was in fifth grade. Since then, she has fine-tuned her craft by experimenting with different styles – her two favorites being realism for painting and abstract linework for drawing – and mediums. “Carpy Collage,” in fact, began as a collage of cut-out photos from Missouri Conservationist magazine.

“It was an assignment from my painting teacher. So basically, we had to make a collage on our own and … that would be our reference for our painting,” Niemczyk explained.

Though she didn’t count the number of days it took to paint, Niemczyk completed “Carpy Collage” after over 30 hours of working on it during her painting class, study hall and even at home after school. It took her a bit longer than some of her other paintings as the canvas – roughly 16 by 12 inches – was a bit bigger than she typically uses. Additionally, some aspects required a high level of detail and patience.

“One thing that took me the longest was probably the hand. It’s my favorite part, I think, because it’s pretty hard to draw hands,” Niemczyk said. “I really, like, bumped up the colors on the hands so it looks more vibrant. It doesn’t look exactly like realism, like it’s realistic in its proportions and everything like that, but it’s just more experimental, I guess, with the colors … It was really fun painting.”

To tie the piece together, Niemczyk stuck with vibrant colors for the body of the fish.

“With the body, there’s green, but also there’s black and pink,” she said. “I did a lot of layering on that – more like how you would do glazings with oil paint – but I used acrylic paint, so it was really fun because I spent a few classes layering the colors and making them look more like (they) have some more depth to them.”

To see “Carpy Collage” and the other pieces that were accepted into the 2023 Young Artist Exhibition: Remix, visit the Saint Louis Art Museum before Friday, Dec. 29.