Incoming Cherry Hill High West junior Emily Davidson won first place in American Legion Post 372’s first annual art mural contest earlier this year.
Students in the competition submit art that centers around a particular war to be recreated on the post’s wall. This year’s wall focuses on World War I, in honor of the founders of the post, and the contest specified no depictions of violence or gory images.
Dvidson’s image features a bright red poppy with soldiers, white crosses representing those who died in the war, and images from the 1919 victory parade in New York City.
“As soon as I heard about the contest, I sat down on the bus, and I was just going through idea after idea about things I knew about WW I,” Davidson recalled. “And the main thing I remembered was poppies. So I wanted this to be centered around poppy flowers, because they’re really important.”
Davidson later did more research on her ideas for accuracy, about the memorial graveyards of the war, where they are and more details on the victory celebration.
“I learned that there was the victory parade in New York,” she noted. “I didn’t know about that until I researched that, and I didn’t know that there was a memorial location with those crosses, like fields of them, in France.”
Though she knew they existed, Davidson didn’t know their exact location.
The idea for the contest began sometime last year, when Post 372 members heard a suggestion from one of their own about a painting on the wall of their headquarters.
“Since it was founded by WW I vets, we’ll start painting pictures of each of the wars on each of the theaters starting with WW I,” explained post Commander Joe Merimonde, affectionately known as Grizz.
This year’s contest was open for about two months to Cherry Hill East and West high schools and the district’s alternative high school. Merimonde said that next year, the post may expand into more schools and begin the contest earlier in the school year, rather than in March, as they did this year.
The process for adapting her painting has also been educational for Davidson, since it was originally done with a combination of watercolor and colored pencils, on a smooth surface rather than the rocky canvas of the wall. Davidson’s 2D art teacher Amy Giampoala is helping with the adaptation process.
“Going from watercolor to acrylic isn’t too much of a jump but we also talked about how it’s not going to be exactly like the picture,” Giampoala noted. “ … It’s not going to be like this perfectly, but we’re going to get it as close as possible.”
“I have learned that things sometimes look better when you let loose and just go with it,” Davidson added. “Because if you go too too careful, it doesn’t work sometimes.”
She wants people to look at her painting and seek more information about it.
“I want to encourage people to generally look deeper into everything,” Davidson remarked, “to want to learn more about the war, think more about it and not just be like, ‘Oh, pretty poppy.’”
