BELFAST—Olivia Sprowl, 16, a student at BCOPE, (Belfast Community Outreach Program in Education), doesn’t know what kind of artist she wants to be yet. But, she’s going to have a chance to find out this May. She has been chosen to attend Haystack Mt. School of Crafts, on Deer Isle, joining 90 other high school students from around Maine.

Shy and reserved, this is going to be a real test for her socially. It’ll be the first time she’s ever been away from home overnight, but it will open her world.

Charles Hamm, her art teacher, is the one who chose her out of all of BCOPE’s students to attend Haystack.

“She’s very shy and reclusive and she’s struggled a lot with health difficulties that have made her miss a lot of school,” he said. “That’s one of the reasons I want her to go to Haystack.”

For Sprowl, it’s an opportunity to explore what’s interesting to her.

“It’s for three days and I’m looking forward to two courses, bookbinding and fashion design,” she said. “I’m not sure what I want to do with art, but I want to expand with more portraits and experiment with more colors like oil paints.”

She typically draws portraits in colored pencil and tends to focus on the subject’s eyes.

“The eyes are really important; they’re kind of like the focus point,” she said.

As an artist, she’d have to look no further for a subject than the mirror, for her own eyes are prominent within her face and artfully rimmed with green and yellow eyeliner.

She was a student at Belfast High School just until this past September, when she transferred to BCOPE, a move that has suited her well. Instead of feeling drowned out by a traditional classroom, she has thrived in the school.

“You have a lot more freedom here,” Oliva said of BCOPE. “You get to decide what you want to do here and can customize it. At the high school, you just do what they tell you to do.When it comes to individual projects, it’s not just like this one box you have to fit your project in.”

“Every school in Maine is invited to send a kid to Haystack and it was pretty easy to pick Olivia,” said Hamm. “It wasn’t even her artwork that made me decide. When she first came to this school, she told me she wanted to go to art school and that put her on my radar. In the art projects that we do, she puts layer upon layer of unasked for aspects to the assignment. She’s thinking about stuff above and beyond what I’m asking for. She’s not just thinking ‘here’s an assignment; I’m just going to do it so it satisfies the grade.’ She’s gets her head around it and throws herself right in.

“I see her blossoming socially so much, Whenever I send a kid to Haystack, I always tell them, ‘This is going to change your life in big ways and small ways. I want her to get out of her shell in a place that I know is safe. It’s really going to help her focus on her artistic drive.”

Haystack’s annual Student Craft Institute welcomes high school juniors, from throughout the state, who have been identified as particularly gifted in the arts, to work in the studios on campus for three days. Participants include students from a number of isolated rural communities, which is an important aspect of the program for the opportunity it provides to youngsters from different backgrounds to discover that they have common interests and can support one another in work undertaken together. More than 1,000 students in Maine have participated in this annual program for the last 34 year. See more: Haystack Mt. School of Crafts

Kay Stephens can be reached at news@penbaypilot.com