Passion. Creativity. Opportunity. These three things are what allowed a young artist to grow her childhood interest into one of her biggest passions in life today. 

Lexi Selof, freshman, is a drawing and charcoal artist. She has developed a passion for it because it has allowed for a creative nature to express itself. With a family of artists, Selof has also been given guidance and have used it to propel her work to its full potential.

“Art is a way for me to really express myself,” Selof said. “In my art, I like making it look realistic and really detailed like a photo. I really want it to resemble what it looks like and the beauty in it and what it looks like to me.”

Selof’s experience with art started a few years ago with inspiration from some of her family members. 

“My mom and grandmother are both artists, but I really started to get into art like three or four years ago as more than just a hobby,” Selof said. “It then became bigger to me because that was around the time my family moved. It became something that I did because I didn’t really know a lot of people, so it became kind of one of my outlets. I began taking lessons at Main Street in Lake Zurich four years ago.”

Selof shared her opinion of how her creativeness is part of the reasons why she is interested in art and the role that it plays in her life.

“I like art more than other activities I do because I am a generally creative person, so that is what I’m really good at and it just comes naturally to me more,” Selof said. “I find more joy in doing it and finishing it and being able to see what I have accomplished in a real complex cool way. When I started though, I never really thought that what I created was really good.”

Her friends, specifically Brianna Miller, freshman, however, think otherwise of Lexi’s art.

“Lexi thinks that her art is not that good, but to be honest, I think it is amazing. The amount of precision to detail that goes into each work is really wowing. One of the works that showed this was a collage for a tree frog that she made for her cousin after her dog passed away. It said, ‘I love you Kate’. Lexi’s work not only has an appearance that is good, but the meaning in which she makes it has a great meaning too,” Miller said.

In school Lexi has won awards for her art such as an IESA, an art award where a piece is picked out of forty students and is K-12 award for Illinois, and a honorable mention for an art collage, and also a number of smaller art awards.

“When I got the awards, I was really proud,” Selof said. “Because I felt like I was being validated in that and I proved that I could actually do something and it was not just good to me, but it was actually good to other people as well.”

According to Selof, her mom and grandmother have really helped her art and also given her lots of support.

“I really like Lexi’s work, but she knows that because her grandma and I are both artists that we both like to critique her work a lot to make it the best that it can be. We help her by pointing out the flaws which Lexi thinks can be a good and bad thing,” Julie Selof, Lexi’s mom, said.

In her life, her mom is one of the people that is her role model and is inspiring to her in many ways, according to Lexi.

“Even though I do think that it is a good and bad thing that my mom is really critical, she is my role model and really inspires me in what I do. She is always there for me and I am really thankful for that. Even though she works a lot and has a busy job, she always makes time to be there for my siblings and I,” Selof said.