During the virtual senior awards presentation art teacher Melanie Bradshaw named Owen Brummel the recipient of the Elliot-Dauffenback Tabb Memoral Art Award.

That means Brummel’s art piece “don’t touch, don’t blink” will be purchased for the school’s permanent art collection.

Brummel, who plans to attend the University of Minnesota in the fall, is an IB art student who has already made a name for himself locally, having received the 2019 Best Young Artist Award at Green Bay’s Art Street .

According to Bradshaw, Brummel is a “skilled artist to be taken seriously here and in the larger art community.”

While Brummel casually calls his self-portrait “guy with a mask,” his art teacher praises it as “technically excellent”and illustrating “the raw emotion of this moment in time perfectly.”

To read Brummel’s serious description of the piece, the description prepared for the juried IB art show, one understands exactly what Ms. Bradshaw meant about this work at this time.

“This is my final piece in my IB exhibition,” explained Brummel. “It marks an unfortunate historical event that suddenly brought my high school career to an end. The sad look in my eyes evokes the struggles during these times in quarantine. It’s a message to appreciate what you have, and to ‘not blink.’ Because something can be taken from you right in front of your face. You may never be able to get those experiences back. A headband pulls my hair out of my eyes to ensure that I don’t blink and take full advantage of every moment as if it were my last.”