Ever since 18-year-old Erin Bazor of Covington was in the first-grade, she’s been drawing. “It helps me focus,” she says, “I draw or doodle every day.” The University View Academy senior recounted seeing a Blue Dog painting by the late Louisiana artist George Rodrigue that sparked her interest in art.
Like Rodrigue, Bazor’s art is unconventional. “I mainly like doing stylized work. I’m not a big fan of traditional art,” she admits. She likes drawing cartoons, comic strips, and creating pieces for video-game designs.
One of the comic-strip characters she developed is named Daniel, who she says she “Dreamed up in the fourth-grade.” Bazor made a silkscreen tapestry that depicts him as a fallen angel “… to show the moment when he transferred from angel to demon,” as she described the storyline. Bazor entered the piece in the Scholastic Art Contest, a nationwide competition. It was awarded an Honorable Mention and led to offers for Bazor to attend two out-of-state art schools on scholarships.
Bazor has been a student at UVA for two-and-a-half years and says doing online classes allows her more time to devote to her art. A significant work could take her 60 to 70 hours to complete. She also attends the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts five-days a week studying visual arts and works a part-time job. She does her live-sessions in the morning with UVA, and after her classes at NOCCA in the afternoon, she resumes her school work. Bazor says the flexibility UVA offers “…made school a lot less stressful.”
Her career goal is to draw cartoons or become a video game designer. She wants to pursue illustration and gaming design in college. “Both seem really cool,” she exclaimed. Her art experience and being an avid video-game player are a fit for the future. “I’m obsessed,” she laughed. Her current favorite video games are Overwatch and Pokemon Shield. She confessed she’d played the games for hundreds of hours. The offers she has from Watkins College of Art in Nashville and Montserrat College of Art in Boston have degree majors that suit her goals. She’s also applying to LSU Shreveport and another art college in Pennsylvania that offer similar programs. Bazor says it’s a tough decision on where to attend and makes her anxious since she’s close to her mom. She says her mother is a huge influence in her art and her life, and she admits being a homebody. “Being away from my mom would be pretty weird,” she declared. “Creativity takes courage,” the great French artist Henri Matisse once said. Erin Bazor already shows creativity in her art. Now, she’ll have to summon courage as she makes her decision about college
